Puškinʼs ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ Revisited: A Reading in Conventional Narrative Irony

PUŠKIN’S ‘MEDNYJ VSADNIK’ REVISITED: A READING IN

CONVENTIONAL NARRATIVE IRONY

PETER BUTLER

Abstract Pushkin’s ‘Mednyi vsadnik’ (‘The Bronze Horseman’) has nearly always been read as the expression of a tragic conflict between the interests of the state and the aspirations of the private individual. Though Evgenij’s suitability as a tragic hero has been called into question, no-one has ever seriously doubted the reality of his misfortune. By tracing the presence of two opposing narrative voices in the poem, the present article endeavours to show that ‘Mednyi vsadnik’ is not in any sense a tragedy but a masterpiece of conventional narrative irony. As the narrator’s credibility is undermined and his version of events dismantled, it becomes clear that for the author Evgenii not only falls short of being a tragic hero but also fails to suffer a tragic fate. In the end, we are forced to realize that ‘Mednyi vsadnik’ is not a parable about the ethics of power but a humorous reflection on the Romantic obsession with dreams. Keywords: Pushkin; ‘Mednyi vsadnik’; Irony Ever since Belinskij, Puškin’s ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ (1833) has been seen as the expression of a conflict between the interests of the state (represented by Peter the Great’s wilful construction of his magnificent capital in the flood-prone Finnish marshes) and the needs and aspirations of the ordinary in-dividual (represented by the hero, who – we are told – loses his fiancée in the great flood of 1824, goes mad with grief and dies). Though it has been

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46 Peter Butler

elaborated upon, this view has rarely been challenged.1 Essentially, what Cor-bet said almost half a century ago still holds true today:

Nul […] ne contestera que le Cavalier de bronze repose sur le conflit entre l’État et ses représentants d’une part et la destinée de la foule anonyme d’autre part.2

What has divided critics is not the basic framework within which the poem should be interpreted but the vexed issue of where Puškin’s sympathies should be seen to lie: with the state (Merežkovskij, Pypin, Sipovskij, Ėngel’-gardt, Gippius, Grossman, Blagoj, Gukovskij, Tomaševskij, Lunačarskij), with the ordinary individual (Tretiak, Brjusov, Makedonov, Makogonenko, Eremin, Tojbin, Izmajlov, Gurevič), or to some degree with both (Mezencev, Antokol’skij, Lavreckaja, Toddes, Schramm, Briggs, Palevskij, Skatov, Maj-min, Ėpštejn, Makarovskaja). This last view, dubbed “tragische Unaufgelöst-heit” by Knigge, sees the tragic conflict, culminating in a confrontation scene between the hero and the eponymous statue of Peter the Great, as largely unresolved.3 Because of the difficulty in reconciling these standpoints, recent criti-cism has tended to regard the text as multivalent and unstable to the point of aporia. If we have difficulty ascertaining where Puškin’s sympathies lie, it is argued, it is because the text invites a plurality of interpretations or sets out to perplex in an attempt to prevent us from reading the author’s mind. In practice, this interpretative strategy often owes more to rhetorical gesture than sustained argument. Rarely is the plurality of readings or the lack of determinate meaning demonstrated by direct reference to the text. All too frequently, we are left with little more than the truism that great works of art tend to give rise to a variety of interpretations, combined with the self-serving assumption that the critical impasse we seem to be facing cannot be the result of a fundamental misapprehension. While I do not deny that ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ is a complex layered text, I can find no evidence of instability, let alone aporia. In my view, ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ is a highly sophisticated example of conventional narrative irony. As such, it provides a stable reading in which ambivalence and ambiguity are resolved in favour of a determinate meaning, as they are in this type of irony. I believe that recognizing this is the key to a comprehensive and consistent interpretation of the poem. The subtle and thoroughgoing irony in question is of a different order to the blatant Romantic irony interspersed with more localized lexical ironies that we find in Evgenij Onegin (1830) and, to some extent also, in the Povesti Belkina (1831), and which critics have had little trouble spotting.4 But perhaps its existence should not come as a complete surprise, because we would not necessarily expect a writer who has moved from unbroken Romanticism to irony to completely retrace his steps.

‘Mednyj vsadnik’ Revisited 47

Another reason why we should not be surprised to find irony in ‘Med-nyj vsadnik’ lies in the strict censorship regime it had to confront. Persuaded that his censors were too lax, Tsar Nicholas I had taken it upon himself to act as Puškin’s personal censor. Irony is a well-known way of bypassing censor-ship, as exemplified by Voltaire’s Candide, William Faulkner’s Sanctuary and Camilo José Cela’s Familia de Pascual Duarte. As Heinrich Heine, commenting on the way freedom of expression had been curbed in his native Germany, wrote in his Romantische Schule:

[Schriftsteller,] die unter Zensur und Geisteszwang aller Art schmach-ten und doch nimmermehr ihre Herzensmeinung verleugnen können, sind ganz besonders auf die ironische und humoristische Form ange-wiesen.5

As far as I know, no-one has ever seriously entertained the idea that ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ might be suffused with irony. Some commentators have accepted that isolated passages may be ironic (e.g. the narrator’s effusive praise of the third-rate poet Chvostov); others have expressly rejected the presence of irony in the poem: Gordin, for example, states categorically that in ‘Mednyj vsadnik’, unlike Evgenij Onegin, “Пушкин […] отказывается от шутливой иронической интонации”.6 In arriving at my interpretation I have therefore had to rely largely on my own observation. I have occasionally been able to profit from the insights of other commentators but have inva-riably found it necessary to extract them from the interpretative context in which they were embedded and to adapt them to my own ends. I have derived most benefit, not from Pushkinologists, but from writers about irony, many of whose conclusions I have made my own. I would therefore like to begin by trying to set out central aspects of a theory of verbal irony. Occasionally this has meant correcting existing misconceptions and making adjustments to mainstream theory. These interventions are necessary to provide a sound basis for the understanding of the irony in ‘Mednyj vsadnik’. Verbal and Narrative Irony This section deals with a form of irony normally called verbal, lexical or rhe-torical irony to distinguish it from dramatic, situational, cosmic and other ironies; and with its narrative extension that we may refer to as conventional (also traditional or classical) narrative (or structural) irony to distinguish it from Romantic irony. All references to irony in this section are references to verbal and conventional narrative irony unless stated otherwise. Quintilian defines irony as “blame through counterfeit praise and praise under pretence of blame” (“laudis adsimulatione detrahere et vituperationis

48 Peter Butler

laudare”; De oratione, VIII). This definition, which is still highly influential, is at once too wide and too narrow. It is too wide because it allows both the expression of blame through praise and the expression of praise through blame. That irony often involves blame through praise is beyond dispute, but it is legitimate to doubt whether praise through blame constitutes irony at all. At the heart of irony, there is always a negative moment, a sense of a meaning being devalued or undercut, a sense of gentle mockery. As Pierre Schoentjes has put it:

Il manque à la louange par le blâme cet élément négatif ou critique qui est inhérent à l’ironie et que les définitions cherchent à souligner quand elles parlent de plaisanterie ou de raillerie. Le moment négatif est indissociable de l’ironie verbale.7

For Schoentjes, using blame to express praise is not a form of irony but a form of urbane politeness.

La maîtresse de maison qui, recevant un bouquet de roses des mains d’un invité, s’écrie “Oh, je vous gronde, il ne fallait pas…” fait peut-être preuve d’une délicatesse exquise qui témoigne de beaucoup d’édu-cation, mais certainement pas d’un sens très développé de l’ironie.8

On the other hand, Quintilian’s definition is too narrow because it li-mits the positive utterances that can be undermined by irony to instances of praise. In conversation, it is often the case that irony involves the subversion of praise, but in more developed ironies of the kind we find in literature, the meaning subverted may be almost any meaning to which we attach a positive valuation. In Swift’s Modest Proposal, for example, the surface meaning con-veys well-meant advice rather than praise. Though there are elements of praise (it is difficult to forget the narrator’s revolting eulogy of well-cooked infants’ flesh), the apparent focus of the narrative is the recommendation of cannibalism as a rational means of solving the problem of hunger and overpopulation in Ireland. Sometimes it is not praise or advice but agreement that is undermined by irony. The best known example is probably the famous opening sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Austen’s narrator here brashly presupposes our unquestioning agreement to an assertion that is obviously misguided. Given our knowledge of social realities, we are quick to understand that it is not young men who are in search of a bride but young women who seek to improve their social status by marrying a wealthy husband. What is undercut by irony may also be an


apology or defence. A good example is Montesquieu’s mock defence of slavery in his Défense de l’esprit des lois (1750).9 But irony can equally well subvert expressions of hope, desire, reassurance, encouragement etc. As Hallay has pointed out, verbal irony may even subvert forms of expression that appear to be free of any explicit valuation.10 The neutral, detached, matter-of-fact tone so characteristic of Flaubertian realism provides a narra-tive surface that can veil the whirls and eddies of authorial irony every bit as well as the most profuse praise. Consequently there is much to be said for Philippe Hamon’s simpler characterization of verbal irony as a figure of speech in which:

[...] on exprime explicitement une positivité […] ou une neutralité […] pour signifier implicitement une négativité.11

While this definition seems broadly acceptable, it suffers from two ma-jor shortcomings that current theory has had considerable difficulty acknow-ledging. First, it fails to recognize that verbal irony may proceed from a negative meaning to another negative meaning. Consider the following remark:

[Said in bad weather:] Oh, what lovely weather. I do so hate it when it’s warm and sunny.

Already a simple conversational irony of this kind allows us to see that irony can not only take the form of movement from a positive or neutral meaning to a negative meaning (using “what lovely weather” to mean “what awful weather”), but also movement from a negative meaning to another, quite distinct, negative meaning that undermines the credibility of the first (using “I do so hate it when it’s warm and sunny” to mean something like “you would have to be perverse to enjoy weather like this”). There can hardly be any doubt that “I do so hate it when it’s warm and sunny”, however we con-trive to understand it, expresses a meaning that is negatively charged: the surface meaning is negative and the ironic meaning also. The ability to pro-ceed from a negative meaning to another negative meaning is an important feature of verbal irony, and not understanding this may obscure the recog-nition of ironies where the surface meaning is negatively charged. We shall find such ironies in ‘Mednyj vsadnik’. Second, it makes the mistake of identifying the non-ironic meaning with an explicit or literal meaning and the ironic meaning with an implicit or non-literal meaning. The French semanticist Robert Martin has repeatedly tried to point out why this view is fundamentally flawed but has received little recognition for his efforts.12 His leading example is as simple as it is cogent:

Nos amis sont toujours là, quand ils ont besoin de nous.

50 Peter Butler

As Martin points out, the ironic meaning of this statement does not involve rejecting the literal meaning in favour of a non-literal meaning. On the contrary, it is precisely the literal meaning that the speaker is emphatically asserting. What makes the assertion ironic is not that the literal meaning is rejected but the fact that the literal meaning deviates from what we would reasonably have expected to hear, namely “Nos amis sont toujours là, quand nous avons besoin d’eux”. The ironic point is that the people in question are not true friends; they are not there for us when we need them but descend on us whenever they need us. Again, failure to recognize this particular semantic constellation can lead to ironies being obscured. We will also find ironies of this kind in ‘Mednyj vsadnik’. When verbal irony is sustained over a whole narrative, we may speak of “narrative” or “structural” irony in the core sense defined by Wayne Booth.13 According to Booth, in conventional narrative irony, the author puts forward an unreliable narrator whose function is to mislead the reader, but, at the same, to betray his own unreliability in such a way and to such an extent that the reader is able to overcome the narrator’s deception and understand the ironic message conveyed by the author. Booth knows that the figure of the “unreliable narrator” is not peculiar to irony, but he believes that con-ventional narrative irony is best analysed in terms of an opposition between the voices of narrator and author. For Booth, both narrator and author are narrative constructs, based on levels of meaning in the text. On this under-standing, “author” cannot be equated with the biographical author. Besides providing a sound framework for the understanding of literary irony, Booth also issues a wise warning:

There is reason to believe that most of us think we are less vulnerable to mistakes with irony than we are. If we have enjoyed many ironies and observed less experienced readers making fools of themselves, we can hardly resist flattering ourselves for making our way pretty well. But the truth is that even highly sophisticated readers often go astray.14

One might go further. There is reason to suppose that it is precisely “highly sophisticated readers”, such as literary scholars, who may be most vulnerable. Awkwardly, narrative irony resists many of the habits of mind that literary scholarship inculcates. Much could be said on this subject but I will limit myself to a few key points. First, literary scholarship works on the understanding that if we study carefully what other scholars have written and continue to deploy the numerous critical “tools” at our disposal, we will, in a collective effort of approximation, gradually come closer to a full under-standing of the text under consideration. Irony does not work like that. With irony – to put it bluntly – you either “get it” or you don’t. Of course, once the ironic intention in a text has been recognized, working out the details of the


ironic message may take a while; but we are talking hours or days, rather than years or generations. Second, since literary scholarship is often in the service of literary history, putting works in (literary, historical, social, biographical) context is of central importance. With narrative irony, preoccupation with context can obscure the message. Narrative irony requires us to focus on the structure of an individual text and the only context it requires is normally provided by the sort of knowledge accessible to any educated reader of the time. This will include some information about the writer, but usually only enough to be able to answer questions of a rather basic kind like: “Could the writer have seriously intended a ‘straight’ reading?”, “Could what appears to be irony be due to nothing more than poor style?”, “Was the writer of sound mind?”.15 Third, verbal irony is understood with reference to a standard of “normality” (conventional usage/common sense/shared knowledge, values and expectations) against which the surface meaning is found wanting. It is the resulting disparity that leads the listener/reader to reconstruct an alterna-tive reading more in line with the implicit standard. This is as true of so-phisticated literary ironies as it is of simple conversational ironies. Literary scholars, knowing that almost anything is possible in a literary text and that literary fashions establish egregious conventions of their own, sometimes feel that to compare what a text says with a standard of “normality” is intolerably naïve. Last but not least, there is the question of proof. Literary scholarship naturally expects a critical reading to be supported by convincing argument based on clear textual and extra-textual evidence. All the interpreter of irony can hope to offer is a tangled web of hints and implications whose con-vincingness may be more dependent on the skill of the ironist and the trans-parency of his design than on the insight of the interpreter. To make matters worse, in conventional narrative irony, the ironic meaning is meant to be recognized, not as one meaning amongst others, but as the real meaning of the text. To claim a text is ironic in this sense is therefore to lay oneself open to the charge of intolerable presumption and unscholarly neglect of other people’s insights.16 Distinguishing Narrator and Author In narrative irony, as we have said, the author tries to distance himself from his narrator while making this act of distancing clear to the discerning reader. But while irony strives to be understood, it is obviously not in the business of serving meanings on a silver platter. Narrative irony is at its best when the reader is not only insistently nudged in the right direction but occasionally given a playful push in the wrong direction. In ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ there are many such playful pushes. By having the narrator think of himself sitting at his desk reading and writing on a clear white night, the author is teasingly associating the narrator with Puškin sitting

52 Peter Butler

at his desk by the window of his study on the Mojka embankment, and by having the narrator say that Evgenij is a name pleasant to his ear and dear to his pen – “Звучит приятно; с ним давно / Мое перо к тому же дружно”17 –, the author is tempting us to identify the narrator with Puškin as the writer of Evgenij Onegin, without of course in either case committing himself to an assertion of what he ultimately knows to be false.18 There is a similar conceit in the preface and the annotations. Since Puškin is known to have been absent from St. Petersburg during the flood and would have had to obtain his knowledge of it at second hand, the prefatory reference to Berch’s famous report of the great flood rings seductively true, as does the reference to Mickiewicz in the third annotation, a poet with whom Puškin shared a friendly rivalry. Indeed, all the annotations create an impression of earnest reality that are meant to mislead the reader into giving credence to the narrator as the voice of an equally earnest author.19 If we are to understand the irony in ‘Mednyj vsadnik’, we need to resist such facile identification. Though we may be seduced into error initially, we need to free ourselves from it as soon as possible. Of course, the point at which the reader may notice that he is being taken for a ride will vary con-siderably. There is no right way to enter an ironic text and there is no set path for the reader to follow. Different readers will respond to different ironic cues and make their own way through the text, often retracing their steps and reassessing the situation as they go, reading and re-reading critical passages. In the case of a complex ironic text, reading through once only will rarely suffice. This creates a problem for exegesis that is largely insoluble. If there is no right way into an ironic text and even the most discerning reader will have to go back and forth to work out what is going on, how can the insights gained in such a process be convincingly set out in a linear fashion? I have opted for a compromise. Rather than start at the beginning of the text, I have chosen as my starting point a part of the text where I believe the irony to be most easily recognizable. I have then allowed myself to zig-zag through the text and to retrace my steps where necessary. Evgenij as a Tragic Hero The irony with regard to Evgenij begins already with the name-giving. It is clear that the narrator, by chosing a name he favours, is showing affection for his hero, but it is less clear that the author shares his enthusiasm. The fact that the narrator has arbitrarily attached a name to his hero can suggest that he is not a credible fictional character and is ultimately no more than a figment of the narrator’s imagination. Of course we might be disposed to dismiss this explicit name-giving as a mere figure of Romantic style, as an isolated in-stance of that deconstruction of fictionality that has been a staple resource of Romantic irony since Tieck. We would do well, however, to keep an open


mind on this issue and to consider the possibility that what we have before us here is not a trivial piece of Romantic irony but a key element in a strategy of conventional irony involving a sustained duality of perspective with a de-terminate outcome. The reference to Evgenij’s family circumstances allows this duality of perspective to be developed. By saying that Evgenij’s family name may even have figured in Karamzin’s famous history of Russia (“Оно, быть может, и блистало / И под пером Карамзина”), the narrator is emphasizing his hero’s illustrious lineage. The author’s emphasis meanwhile is squarely on the “быть может”, which implicitly reduces the family’s title to fame to mere speculation. Matters do not improve with the addition of “В родных преданьях прозвучало”. The narrator would like us to understand “родных” as referring broadly to Evgenij’s native people, but the author is prompting us to think of it as referring only to the family in question. This allows the author to smuggle in a subversive sense of anti-climax: few names grace the annals of history but many can be said to be the subject of family legend of some sort. As a result, the narrator’s subsequent admission that the family is now completely forgotten comes as no surprise. That Evgenij is said to have a job, live in a suburb, and have no interest in his dead ancestors or the forgotten past, may be thought of as an indication of his noble independence of spirit, as the narrator would have it, or as evidence of the fact that Evgenij is merely the unremarkable scion of a not so aristocratic family, as the author would like us to realize. The thoughts that keep Evgenij awake after he returns from a visit to friends allow the irony to develop:

О чем же думал он? о том, Что был он беден, что трудом Он должен был себе доставить И независимость и честь; Что мог бы бог ему прибавить Ума и денег. Что ведь есть Такие праздные счастливцы, Ума недальнего, ленивцы, Которым жизнь куда легка! Что служит он всего два года;

Again, the narrator’s sympathy with “poor” Evgenij is obvious, but the author’s reservations are clearly perceptible. It is not hard to see through the rhetorical veneer of “трудом / Он должен был себе доставить / И незави-симость и честь” and to understand that what is really at issue is that “poor” Evgenij has discovered that he will actually have to work for a living. The irony is helped by the ambiguity of “труд”, which like English labour, can refer to strenuous physical work or simply to work as an economic category; and by the fact that “независимость” and “честь” readily translate into the advantages that normally accrue from an honest day’s work. The narrator’s

54 Peter Butler

sympathy is still with Evgenij when, kept awake by his troubled thoughts, he wishes God had provided him with more intelligence and wealth. The author, however, is confident that our sympathy will not bend to this and hopes that we will soon begin to recognize “poor” Evgenij for what he is: something of a spoilt brat; we all sometimes wish we were cleverer and richer than we are but it is not something any of us would lose any sleep over. The narrator’s sympathy even extends to Evgenij’s lament about there being people he considers more fortunate than himself. Again the author knows that we are unlikely to follow the narrator in this. We all know that there are people better off than ourselves but we do not normally make an issue of it, still less crave divine assistance in overcoming it. Of course, when we read “Что мог бы бог ему прибавить / Ума” we are for a moment touched by the apparent humility of this confession to intellectual weakness. For a moment too, our sympathy is ready to spill over into our reading of the subsequent “И денег”, so we prepare to commiserate with a pauper’s desperate plight, until we suddenly realize, in the absence of any evidence of genuine poverty, that what is more likely to be at issue in “прибавить / Ума и денег” is greed for money and social status, intelligence being little more than the wherewithal to acquire both without undue effort. Consider also how the rest of Evgenij’s lament is worded. Considered in isolation, “праздные” and “ленивцы” might simply be an expression of moral censure, but the addition of “счастливцы” and “Которым жизнь кула легка” introduces a strong hint of resentment and envy. We can sense that Evgenij is galled by these people’s idleness because he too would like to be rich and idle. Potentially revealing is also “[думал о том] Что служит он всего два года”. Why this emphasis on “всего два года”? Given what we have just learnt, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that what is bothering Evgenij is that he has not been working long enough to have risen to the level where he might enjoy a comfortable sinecure, or long enough to have amassed sufficient capital or years of service to call it a day. If we have been able to pick up on the irony in this passage, we should have little trouble in approaching the rest of the characterization of Evgenij with the necessary scepticism. The narrator now tries to persuade us that Evgenij is a sincere, devoted young man who longs for nothing more than a life of quiet contentment with his beloved Paraša, a simple girl living with her mother on the outskirts of town. However, the speech he puts in Evgenij’s mouth does not quite ring true. His “Жениться? Мне? зачем же нет?” is strangely half-hearted and hardly expresses the sort of devotion and commit-ment a young lady might expect from an ardent suitor. Matters do not really improve with “Oнo и тяжело, конечно; / Но что ж, я молод и здоров, / Трудиться день и ночь готов”. The narrator is hoping to impress us with Evgenij’s willingness to work indefatigably, but we find it hard to believe him. We have already discovered that work is a sore point with Evgenij. The point is ironically underscored by “готов”, which makes it clear that the


uncharacteristic effort Evgenij imagines is not a present reality, and by the exaggeration of the burden of marriage in “Трудиться день и ночь”, which makes us wonder whether Evgenij’s dramatic rhetoric is not simply the self-exhortation of a wimp. Evgenij’s intention to build a modest dwelling for himself and his beloved might impress us, were it not for the selfish per-spective that flashes up in “себе уcтрою”; and in the ambiguous “успокою”, which leaves it tellingly open whether Evgenij imagines himself to be satis-fying Paraša’s needs or to be pacifying her in her justifiable disappointment. Why she might be disappointed is hinted at in the equally ambiguous “кое-как”, which could mean that he will try to manage to build the dwelling somehow, which is laudable, or that he will do it any old how, which is not. The ambivalence of “приют” adds to the irony, leaving it open whether the envisioned dwelling is a proper house or just a shack. Evgenij’s vision of his future job also does not quite fit the image of a determined, hard-working young man. By having Evgenij call the job he aspires to a “местечко”, the narrator is trying to create an impression of unassuming modesty; the author, however, having made it abundantly clear that Evgenij already has a job, wishes us to understand that this “местечко” is not just any job, but pre-sumably a better job, a higher position, a cushy number even. His plans for Paraša are similarly suspect. You do not have to be a modern-day feminist to sense that his “Параше / Препоручу семейство наше / И воспитание ре-бят” makes her seem suspiciously like a domestic servant, with the unduly formal “препоручу” making the allocation of duties sound like a coldly bureaucratic, even militaristic, act. There is little indication here of anything one might expect a romantically inclined young man to feel: love, romance, passion, desire; nothing beyond a curiously anaemic sense of companionship, a sense of togetherness in death rather than life, as if this relationship were more a matter of dying than living, as if it were merely the enactment of a hidden death wish:

И станем жить, и так до гроба Рука с рукой дойдем мы оба, И внуки нас похоронят...

I am of course not the first to suggest that Evgenij is a problematic hero. Gukovskij has pointed out that Evgenij falls short of being an ideal figure, although he emphatically affirms Evgenij’s suitability as a tragic hero.20 Ėngel’gardt is more sceptical and is quick to notice that Evgenij’s criticism of the lazy good-for-nothings he sees around him is little more than an expression of envy.21 However, neither Gukovskij nor Ėngel’gardt notices that there are two distinct voices in this description: that of the narrator who is praising Evgenij and that of the author who is criticizing him. Ėngel’gardt

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partially picks up on the author’s voice but ignores that of the narrator. Gukovskij confuses the two. However much the narrator may admire him, for the author Evgenij is little more than a spoilt brat. As such, he is hardly credible as a tragic hero. Reading on, we may therefore ask ourselves how this patently so un-tragic hero can possibly suffer a tragic loss and meet a tragic end. Indeed this is precisely the question we are meant to ask and the author’s answer is as simple as it is consistent: he cannot and does not. The Loss of Paraša To understand why Evgenij does not suffer a tragic loss, we need to continue reading the text closely and with the requisite suspicion. Let us first consider the passage where Evgenij discovers the loss of Paraša. Having waited for the flood waters to subside, he rushes down to the river and takes a ferry to the other side. He then sets off to find the house where Paraša lives. At first , he finds himself running through familiar streets, but then, amid the destruction, he suddenly becomes unsure: he stops, goes back, turns round and looks again. Then he sees a willow-tree marking the spot where he believes the house must have stood, but discovers there are no gates, and no house. Walking round and round, he starts reasoning loudly with himself, then hits himself on the forehead with one hand, and bursts out laughing.

[…] Несчастный Знакомой улицей бежит В места знакомые. Глядит, Узнать не может. Вид ужасный! Всё перед ним завалено; Что сброшено, что снесено; Скривились домики, другие Совсем обрушились, иные Волнами сдвинуты; кругом, Как будто в поле боевом, Тела валяются. Евгений Стремглав, не помня ничего, Изнемогая от мучений, Бежит туда, где ждет его Судьба с неведомым известьем, Как с запечатанным письмом. И вот бежит уж он предместьем, И вот залив, и близок дом... Что ж это?.. Он остановился. Пошел назад и воротился. Глядит... идет... еще глядит.


Вот место, где их дом стоит; Вот ива. Были здесь вороты – Снесло их, видно. Где же дом? И, полон сумрачной заботы, Все ходит, ходит он кругом, Толкует громко сам с собою – И вдруг, ударя в лоб рукою, Захохотал.

Anyone reading ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ for the first time is bound to be taken aback by Evgenij’s extraordinary reaction to the missing house, and to ask himself why he laughs out loud and what he is reasoning to himself about. The narrator is strangely reticent on this matter. Evgenij’s behaviour is crying out for an explanation, but, for the time being at least, no explanation is forthcoming. In his wordy prologue, the narrator saw fit to regale us with all manner of exquisite detail about soldiers’ uniforms, bachelor parties etc., but here we are suddenly left entirely to our own devices.22 We should be wary of this: conspicuous underinterpretation is a favourite device of the ironist because it can accommodate several meanings, allowing the reader to choose between them. In the present instance, readers have been quick to interpret Evgenij’s behaviour in terms of what follows: the references to Evgenij’s unhinged state of mind, his self-imposed homelessness, his aimless wanderings and his vision of being chased by the Bronze Horseman. An elaborate case has been made for Evgenij’s madness and his laughter has been made to fit the picture, albeit somewhat awkwardly and with certain misgivings. On this interpretation, Evgenij’s laughter is often seen as the first symptom of his madness, although for some it is not quite clear how he ma-naged to go mad so quickly. This has worried Andreas Ebbinghaus in parti-cular, who claims that Evgenij’s protracted perambulations and deliberations at the scene of the disaster are necessary to give him sufficient time to go mad.23 Of course, you do not have to go to such extravagant lengths to justify this interpretation. Inappropriate laughter is a recognized symptom of shock, so maybe it is not just inconsolable grief but the shock of sudden bereave-ment that has unhinged Evgenij’s mind:

Но бедный, бедный мой Евгений... Увы! его смятенный ум Против ужасных потрясений Не устоял.

But all this is somehow strange. Inappropriate laughter may be a re-cognized symptom of shock, but it is an unusual symptom; hitting oneself on the forehead once with one hand is hardly a paradigmatic expression of grief; and severe shock does not normally induce psychosis. What is more, it is still

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unclear what Evgenij is debating with himself about. To make matters worse, the wording of the narrator’s sparse retrospective commentary is suspicious. Leaving poetic licence aside and taking what the narrator is saying at face value, we are given to conclude that what is at issue here is not that Evgenij’s mind was unhinged by a single life-changing tragedy, as we initially assume, but that his already unhinged mind (“его смятенный ум”) could not cope with terrible shocks (note the tell-tale plural in “Против ужасных потря-сений / Не устоял”; italics mine – P.B.), which is another matter entirely, and suggests morbid oversensitivity rather than tragic suffering. Could there be another explanation, one that is more credible and appropriate to the description of Evgenij’s behaviour? Indeed there is; but in order to tease it out, we need to look backwards instead of forwards: we need to return to Paraša’s previous “appearances” in the text. The last time she was mentioned, Evgenij was sitting astride one of the guardian lions framing the entrance to a well-known house on Senate Square:

Тогда, на площади Петровой, Где дом в углу вознесся новый, Где над возвышенным крыльцом С подъятой лапой, как живые, Стоят два льва сторожевые, На звере мраморном верхом, Без шляпы, руки сжав крестом, Сидел недвижный, страшно бледный Евгений. Он страшился, бедный, Не за себя. Он не слыхал, Как подымался жадный вал, Ему подошвы подмывая, Как дождь ему в лицо хлестал, Как ветер, буйно завывая, С него и шляпу вдруг сорвал.

We have no idea how Evgenij ended up in this extraordinary position and his pose astride the lion seems rather odd. However, leaving this aside for a moment, let us concentrate on what Evgenij is reported to be seeing:

Его отчаянные взоры На край один наведены Недвижно были.

This description of this act of seeing is strangely non-committal. We cannot even be sure that Evgenij is seeing anything at all. More to the point, what Evgenij seems to be seeing would hardly be visible to him from where he is sitting. Though the narrator is at pains to make us believe that Evgenij’s


vantage point is elevated (“Где дом в углу вознесся новый, / Где над воз-вышенным крыльцом”; even “с подъятой лапой” makes a vain gesture toward elevation; italics mine – P.B.), and that Paraša’s hut is unusually close to the shore (“близехонько к волнам, почти у самого залива”; italics mine – P.B.), common sense tells us that a tiny suburban hut complete with un-painted fence would hardly be discernible from the obviously still rather low elevation of this inner-city landmark, even if the hut were on the very edge of the bay. Puškin would of course have expected most of his readers to have some knowledge of the topography of the capital and to any such reader it is clear that the only buildings Evgenij would be able to see from where he is sitting outside the then newly erected Lobanov-Rostovskij Palace (now com-monly known as the “Lions Palace” or “Дом со львами”) – looking across the Neva past the statue of the Bronze Horseman, with the Senate and Synod buildings to the left and the Admiralty to the right – would be the imposing buildings on the embankment opposite (now Universitetskaja Naberežnaja): Solov’ev House, as it was then known, formerly a palace of Peter II (built in 1714, now housing the Faculty of Philology); the Manež Kadetskogo Kor-pusa (built in 1759); and Menšikov Palace, one of St. Petersburg’s most luxu-rious residences (built in 1710). What is more, the narrator’s “близехонько к волнам” implicitly weakens his already rather weak “почти у самого зали-ва” because in a flood that has already submerged large areas of the town, the waves would extend far beyond any place that could legitimately be described as close to the shore. What the author is trying to get us to see here, despite the narrator’s noises to the contrary, is that Evgenij is merely ima-gining the scene in question. The author is driving his ironic point home as best he can: “его Параша, / Его мечта... Или во сне / Он это видит?” (italics mine – P.B.) is a massive nudge in the right direction. Of course, the ironist cannot completely give the game away, so he allows the narrator to cover up by adding the pseudo-philosophical “иль вся наша / И жизнь ничто, как сон пустой, / Насмешка неба над землей?” But this is not all. What is even more disconcerting here is the noti-ceably clichéd nature of Evgenij’s vision. An aristocrat’s country girl-friend living in a ramshackle dwelling with her widowed mother near a large town is a trope uncannily reminiscent of Karamzin’s Bednaja Liza (1792). The name Paraša reminds us of Deržavin’s idealized country belle in his idyllic ode to Paraša (“Белокурая Параша, / Сребророзова лицом, / Коей мало в свете краше / Взором, сердцем и умом!”; 1789). For the contemporary reader, it must also have called to mind the historically real, but already legendary and romantically idealized, Praskov’ja Kovaleva a.k.a. Žemčugova (1768-1803), the prematurely deceased peasant mistress and later wife of Count Nikolaj Šeremetev, scion of one of Russia’s richest and most noble families.24 Willow-trees are symbolic of mourning and were often planted to mark burial sites. A willow-tree figures prominently in ‘Sel’skoe Kladbišče’

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(1802), Žukovskij’s free verse translation of Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country-Churchyard’ (1751).25 In Homer’s Odyssey, willow-trees mark the spot where Ulysses is told to moor his boat after crossing the Oceanus on his way into the underworld.26 So the presence of a willow-tree here fits in suspiciously well with the death wish ironically imputed to Evgenij earlier on and with Evgenij’s attempt to use the willow-tree as point of orientation in his search for Paraša. Could it be that Evgenij is not just imagining Paraša’s hut on this particular occasion; could it be that the willow-tree, the hut, the widowed mother, indeed Paraša herself, are mere figments of the hero’s mor-bidly sentimental and cliché-ridden imagination, just as Evgenij is implicitly a figment of the narrator’s imagination? To seek enlightenment on this crucial issue, we need to return to the point in the narrative where Paraša makes her first appearance. Having gone to bed, Evgenij lies awake musing, about his lack of money, the intolerable hardship of having to earn a living, the unmerited success of those more fortunate than himself, and so on. At the end of this long list of preoccu-pations, we come to:

Он также думал, что погода Не унималась; что река Всё прибывала; что едва ли С Невы мостов уже не сняли И что с Парашей будет он Дни на два, на три разлучен. Евгений тут вздохнул сердечно И размечтался, как поэт: “Жениться? Мне? зачем же нет?”

Paraša is clearly mentioned but she conspicuously lacks any kind of vital presence: she occurs only in Evgenij’s thoughts and she is obviously not foremost in his mind. That having been said, she seems real enough. Evgenij appears to know where she lives and is aware that he will be separated from her when high water causes the bridges over the Neva to be withdrawn. There are, however, three things we should notice. The first concerns the verb размечтаться in “Евгений тут вздохнул сердечно / И размечтался, как поэт”. Verbs of this kind (раздуматься, расписаться, распеваться, etc.) are not straightforwardly inchoative; they refer not so much to the beginning of an action as to its intensification; they convey a sense of an action “getting underway” or “getting into full swing”; not infrequently they also convey a sense of abandonment to the action. What the author is trying to do by using размечтаться here is to suggest that Evgenij’s “Жениться? Мне? зачем же нет?” may not be the exact point at which Evgenij begins to dream. He would like us to consider the possibility that Evgenij’s dreaming may have


begun somewhat earlier and may therefore encompass the preceding “И что с Парашей будет он / Дни на два, на три разлучен”. This brings us to the second point. Consider the noticeably sparse wording of “с Парашей будет он / Дни на два, на три разлучен”. What is important here is not so much what the narrator has said as what he might reasonably have been expected to say but has not: he has not said that Evgenij will be unable to go and see his beloved Paraša, to hold her in his arms, to look into her eyes, to run his hand through her hair, to feel the touch of her skin, to smell the scent of her body – all we have is the abstract idea of separation. Besides being abstract, this idea of separation is also dangerously threadbare: one can be separated from something or someone one has never seen, and to believe oneself separated from something or someone it is enough to believe that the thing or person in question is in another place that is temporarily inaccessible. If we now consider that a girl living in a hut would have to be living out of town, and that this is how she would have to be pictured even if she were a fantasy, we suddenly come to realize that the narrator’s “разлучен” falls critically short of providing conclusive proof of her existence. We all have a tendency to give our fantasies a real, or at least partially real, location, so there is little reason to suppose that Evgenij would do any differently. The third point we need to pick up on has to do with Evgenij’s falling asleep. Falling asleep is an experience we are all familiar with. We know that for the onlooker it often seems clear when someone is still awake and when they have fallen asleep; but we know that for the person falling asleep the transition is anything but clear: thoughts seem to merge seamlessly into dreams. It is for this reason that, having drifted off for a while, we are sometimes unsure whether we have slept at all.27 Scholars have asked themselves why the author here suddenly resorts to inner monologue. If you recognize the author’s ironic intention, the answer is simple: he is inviting us to consider Evgenij’s falling asleep not just from the perspective of the narrator as onlooker but also from the inward perspective of Evgenij as the person affected. For the narrator as onlooker it seems clear enough when it is that Evgenij falls asleep: it is the moment when he closes his eyes (“Сонны очи / Он наконец закрыл”). For Evgenij, however, it is far from clear: his thoughts about money, employment and the injustice of life would merge seamlessly into his dreams. So where is the exact point of transition? Is Paraša, who is mentioned last of all, still part of his waking thoughts or already part of his dreams? This is the question which we are invited to ask and to answer for ourselves later on, when we come to the scene where Evgenij sets off to find Paraša after the storm. Let us return to this scene (already quoted above). If we have understood the author’s implication that Paraša may be nothing more than a figment of Evgenij’s imagination, we can re-read this passage in a fresh light. We are no longer fooled by the fact that Evgenij at first sets off through familiar streets. As we have said, people often endow

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their fantasies with an approximate location. Evgenij’s attempts at orientation now suddenly become charged with meaning: if he is so familiar with Para-ša’s dwelling because he has been there so often, why does he have to try so hard to find it? The narrator would like us to believe that this is because so much has been destroyed, but the author is sowing doubt: if the streets Evgenij first comes across are easily recognizable (“Знакомой улицей бе-жит / В места знакомые”), why the sudden disorientation? Again, we can go along with the narrator and assume that this is because Evgenij has now reached an area of much greater destruction, but there is something suspi-ciously vague about:

И вот залив, и близок дом... Что ж это?.. Он остановился.

By no means all the dwellings have been completely destroyed, as the narra-tor is bound to admit; some have sustained structural damage but are evi-dently still standing:

Скривились домики, другие Совсем обрушились, иные Волнами сдвинуты [...]

But if some buildings are still standing, why does Evgenij not use them as points of orientation? The narrator may wish us to believe that this is because a number have been displaced by the waves (“иные / Волнами сдвинуты”), but this is not entirely convincing. We cannot help wondering just how far the buildings could have been displaced without collapsing. Our scepticism is fostered by “сдвинуты”, because the verb сдвинуть normally refers to trans-position by pushing and sliding without lifting (сдвинуть шкаф с места). Its use here casts doubt on the distance travelled and the amount of thrust involved. The question therefore remains: why are Evgenij’s attempts at orientation so heavily dependent on the bay (“И вот залив”) and the willow-tree (“Вот ива”)? What the author is trying to get us to understand is that Evgenij has nothing more to go on: these are the only topographically rele-vant details his vague sentimental dream provides. Tellingly, when Evgenij reaches the willow-tree and believes he has found the place where Paraša’s hut must have stood, he finds nothing: there are no remains of the hut nor even any remains of the gate and fence; everything has gone. From the author’s point of view this is only logical. Since Paraša’s hut does not exist any more than Paraša herself exists, Evgenij is bound to find exactly what he does: nothing. However, it is only in the following lines that the author’s viewpoint fully comes into its own:


Все ходит, ходит он кругом, Толкует громко сам с собою – И вдруг, ударя в лоб рукою, Захохотал.

Now we can finally make sense of Evgenij’s behaviour. He is loudly debating with himself because he is desperately trying to work out why the reality he has encountered simply will not fit the image in his head, even making allowance for the destruction that must have occurred. It is this process of reasoning that finally leads him to the realization that he has been making a fool of himself: confusing his dream with reality, he has rushed off on a wild-goose chase to find the non-existent Paraša and now finds himself frantically looking for elements of his dream in reality. He then does what many of us do when we discover that we have done something completely stupid: he hits himself on the forehead with the heel of his hand and laughs out loud. It will of course be objected that this interpretation, though it may provide a more convincing reading of this particular passage, does not fit in with the rest of the story: if Evgenij merely loses his dream and not his real-life beloved, he can hardly be considered to suffer the deep emotional trauma that ultimately motivates his subsequent madness and death. While this is undeniably true, it is of no consequence, because, as we shall discover, Evgenij does not go mad and does not die. Evgenij’s Madness and Death The first point to notice is that, though Evgenij’s falling asleep is described in meticulous detail, there is no mention whatsoever of his subsequent waking up. There is a reference to Evgenij waking up, but it occurs much later in connection with a night said to have been spent sleeping on the quay and so cannot reasonably be correlated with the initial falling asleep. But the reference to this later waking up is tantalizing precisely because any mention of an earlier waking up is so conspicuously absent. After learning of the initial falling asleep, we were waiting for the subsequent проснулся but it never came; having forgotten about it, and assuming that the poet had better things to do than routinely document Evgenij’s waking up, we are suddenly reminded of the missing проснулся by its late appearance in another context. There is nothing fortuitous about this. The effect has been carefully calcu-lated and is an integral part of the author’s meaning. In order to unravel this strand of meaning fully, we need to pay attention to certain aspects of the narrative which initially seem unrelated to the question of Evgenij’s waking up. The first of these is description of the weather that prefaces the account of Evgenij’s return home after a night out with friends:

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Сердито бился дождь в окно, И ветер дул, печально воя.

The central elements of this description – the sound of the wind howling and the sound of rain beating against the window – are repeated as Evgenij is about to close his eyes:

[…] он желал, Чтоб ветер выл не так уныло И чтобы дождь в окно стучал Не так сердито...

We come across them again when Evgenij is suddenly found sitting astride the stone lion in the midst of the flood:

[…] Он не слыхал […] Как дождь ему в лицо хлестал, Как ветер, буйно завывая, С него и шляпу вдруг сорвал.

The sounds of wind and water prominently accompany Evgenij’s alleged anguish in the days after the flood. The only difference is that now, instead of the sound of rain beating against the window, we have the sound of a river churning in its bed:

[…] Мятежный шум Невы и ветров раздавался В его ушах.

The same sounds come up again when we meet Evgenij half a year later sleeping rough on the quay. The sound of rain beating against the window has now been replaced by the sound of waves beating against the harbour steps but is still recognizably the sound of water beating against a smooth surface (the author is careful to specify “гладкие ступени”; italics mine – P.B.):

[…] Дышал Ненастный ветер. Мрачный вал Плескал на пристань, ропща пени И бьясь об гладкие ступени [...]

Only a few lines later we again have the sound of raindrops and wind, this time combined with a third, typically nocturnal, sound:


Дождь капал, ветер выл уныло И с ним вдали, во тьме ночной Перекликался часовой...

These repetitions, with their subtle variations, are there for a purpose. That the sound of the wind and the rain is mentioned twice in rapid succession before Evgenij falls asleep is meant to fix them in our minds so that we will recognize them when we come across them again. The first repetition after Evgenij has fallen asleep is perhaps unsurprising: since the sounds are clearly related to the same storm, the similarity of sound might be attributed to the sameness of the event. The next two repetitions contain the subtle variations we have mentioned – the sound of rain is replaced by the sound of waves – but with obvious similarities between the two. This time, however, the sounds are clearly unrelated to the storm; and this time the repetition is some-what suspicious. When the narrator then returns to the original combination of wind howling and raindrops falling in “Дождь капал, ветер выл уныло” we begin to feel distinctly irritated. After sleeping rough throughout a harsh St. Petersburg winter, Evgenij would hardly be bothered by a few drops of rain and the wind howling – so why mention this? For that matter, why is there no reference to the crippling cold he must have suffered during the long sub-arсtic winter nights, especially since he is said to be sleeping on the harbour quay, one of the most exposed locations imaginable. The only men-tion of cold comes in the scene where Evgenij confronts the statue of Peter the Great:

И взоры дикие навел На лик державца полумира. Стеснилась грудь его. Чело К решетке хладной прилегло [...] (Italics mine – P.B.)

This only makes matters worse. Are we really to believe that, having sur-vived the cold of an entire winter, Evgenij would be significantly affected by the chill of iron railings on his forehead? By driving us almost to exaspera-tion here, the author is hoping that we will finally understand what he is trying to tell us: that Evgenij has fallen asleep to the sound of the wind howl-ing and the rain beating against his window and continues to hear these sounds as he sleeps. As sleepers do, he incorporates these extraneous sensa-tions into his dream, with varying degrees of ingenuity and success.28 That there is no mention of cold beyond a chill to the forehead is readily explained by the fact that Evgenij does not feel the cold: he is warmly tucked up in a bed with at most a cool draft wafting over his exposed forehead. There is one further point we need to pick up on. It is significant that in the last repetition we suddenly have the call of a night-watchman mingling with the sound of

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wind and rain. What the author would like us to understand is that the call of the night-watchman is just as real as the sound of the wind and the rain and has been incorporated into Evgenij’s dream in exactly the same way. This implication is crucial because it makes us realize that sounds other than those of the wind and the rain are impinging on Evgenij’s dream and alerts us to the fact that there may be still other sounds that do the same. Without this realization, we can scarcely understand the irony in the description of the scene where Evgenij is hotly pursued by the Bronze Horseman:

И он по площади пустой Бежит и слышит за собой – Как будто грома грохотанье – Тяжело-звонкое скаканье По потрясенной мостовой. И, озарен луною бледной, Простерши руку в вышине, За ним несется Всадник Медный На звонко-скачущем коне; И во всю ночь безумец бедный, Куда стопы ни обращал, За ним повсюду Всадник Медный С тяжелым топотом скакал.

There is one line here that is far more important than any other. It is the seemingly parenthetic:

Как будто грома грохотанье [...]

What the author is prompting us to understand here is that the sound of the Bronze Horseman chasing Evgenij is like the sound of thunder because it is the sound of thunder: asleep during the storm, Evgenij not only hears the wind and the rain, and a night-watchman calling, but also the claps and rumble of thunder. Notice how the description of the sound of the horse’s gallop mimics the familiar sound of thunder: first we have a deeply resonant clattering of hooves (“Тяжело-звонкое скаканье” and “На звонко-скачущем коне”) mimicking loud claps of thunder; then we have a dull trampling sound (“тяжелым топотом скакал”) mimicking the protracted rumble that ensues. Pumpjanskij was the first to notice the striking acoustic difference between “Тяжело-звонкое скаканье” and “На звонко-скачущем коне”, on the one hand, and “тяжелым топотом скакал”, on the other; but, failing to understand the irony, he attributes the difference to a change of scene: at first, he says, Evgenij was in the middle of Senate Square, where there is an echo; then he turns into a side alley, where there is no echo.29


Needless to say, Pumpjanskij can offer no other textual evidence in favour of this gratuitous, and acoustically improbable, assumption. That everything after the moment Evgenij falls asleep is a dream is brought out in another way too. Besides showing us how extraneous sensa-tions impinge on and inform Evgenij’s dream, the author tries hard to imbue subsequent events with a dream-like quality. Already Kahn seems to have noticed something of this kind:

By letting Evgenij fall asleep, Puškin effects a deft transition into the description of the flood without clearly demarcating the boundaries between reality and his dream world.30

However, Kahn fails to appreciate the significance of his own insight. Unware of the irony, he confounds the perspectives of narrator and author, and interprets the result as semantic indeterminacy. But the intentional vague-ness of the ironist has nothing to do with indeterminacy; it is simply a way of accommodating the necessary “double-take”: in the present instance, the perspective of the narrator, who would like us to think that the events he is relating are real, and the perspective of the author, who is encouraging us to question the narrator’s pretence and to see that everything that happens after Evgenij falls asleep is a dream. Already the scene with Evgenij sitting astride the marble lion with the water lapping at his feet has a conspicuously unreal quality. As we said be-fore, we have absolutely no idea how Evgenij ended up in this unusual posi-tion; the last time we come across him he was soundly asleep in bed, and there was no mention of him waking up and making his way through flooded streets from his room in Kolomna to Senate Square. We are of course free to construct our own scenario, but the author has been careful not to give us any help. In fact, he is soon to put a major obstacle in our path. Describing the abating waters in the next section of the poem, the narrator says:

Вода сбыла, и мостовая Открылась [...] (Italics mine – P.B.)

The seemingly innocuous reference to the re-opening of the streets creates a problem: if the streets have now been re-opened, they must have been closed during the flood, so how did Evgenij manage to get to his strange riverside location? Of course, we can try to find a hypothetical explanation for this anomaly and re-construct our scenario accordingly – or we can begin to understand what the author is trying to tell us: that Evgenij is dreaming. The strange figure Evgenij cuts as he sits astride the lion is meant to help us draw the right conclusion. Of Evgenij’s pose, Kahn remarks:

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Evgenij mounted on the lion is clearly a grotesque parody of the equestrian Peter the Great.31

Again, Kahn makes a pertinent observation but is unable to grasp its full significance. Evgenij’s pose certainly is a ridiculous imitation of Peter’s: it is not just that Evgenij has mounted the lion as Peter has mounted his horse; he is facing the same way and staring into the distance just as Peter is said to be doing; more poignantly, the lion’s raised paw seems to mimic Peter’s outstretched arm. The resemblance is even more ridiculous for any reader familiar with the actual lions and their strangely jovial expressions. However, the point of this ridiculous resemblance is not parody, but rein-forcement of the irony. What the author is prompting us to understand is that Evgenij’s pose is too ridiculous to be true: it is not real but a reflection of the way a subconscious wish to emulate Peter the Great has suddenly surfaced in the uninhibited, distorted world of Evgenij’s dreams. As if that were not enough, we still have the narrator’s interjection:

[…] Или во сне Он это видит? иль вся наша И жизнь ничто, как сон пустой, Насмешка неба над землей?

whose ironic import we have commented on before and which can be taken to refer not only to the unreality of Evgenij’s vision but also to the unreality of the scene in which it is embedded. There is also a dream-like quality to the subsequent:

И он, как будто околдован, Как будто к мрамору прикован, Сойти не может! Вкруг него Вода и больше ничего!

When the narrator tells us that Evgenij appears rooted to the spot, unable to dismount because of the surrounding water, he seems to be suggesting that Evgenij is paralysed with fear in a life-threatening situation. This sounds plausible – at least until we remember that the narrator has just told us that Evgenij had no fear for himself (“Oн страшился, бедный / Не за себя”). The life-threatening situation too is rather doubtful. That the top of a wave has just managed to wash the bottom of the sole of Evgenij’s shoe (“подымался жадный вал / Ему подошвы подмывая”) hardly spells im-minent disaster, especially since Evgenij still has the main entrance to the Lions’ Palace directly behind him. The sense of impending danger is also mitigated by the cunning cumulation of под’s working against the alleged upward thrust of the water, and by the strategic use of the ambivalent


“подмывая”. The verb подмывать can be vaguely threatening when it con-jures up an image of water relentlessly undermining a river bank but it can also be the epitomе of harmlessness when it calls to mind a mother washing her baby’s bottom (подмывать ребенка). What the author would like us to realize is that Evgenij’s paralysis, invested with a touch of magic and mystery by “как будто околдован” (“as if spellbound/bewitched”), is not the readily explicable paralysis of fear in the face of danger we first assume it to be, but that seemingly mysterious paralysis that sometimes overcomes us in our dreams and which is popularly known in Russian as “old-witch syndrom” (синдрoм старой ведьмы). It is caused, scientists tell us, by the hypnagogic (pre-dormative) or hypnopompic (post-dormative) perception of sleep para-lysis, but although most of us do not know the science, we all know the experience.32 Another point in the text where a sense of eery unreality may be felt is the description of Evgenij setting over the Neva in his bid to find Paraša. Kahn notes the way this scene echoes classical accounts of the descent into Hades:

Firstly, there is the suggestion of Evgenij’s death through etymological association of the verb “zamirat’”. Secondly, the narrator speculates that the river is turbulent because it is heated from underneath by a fire, thereby recalling the Avernus, the entrance into Hades through which Aeneas descends. Thirdly, the image of the ferryman who collects a fare in coin before transporting the hero across the deadly river, whether it is the Styx for Aeneas or Phlegron for Dante and Vergil. The “grivennik” that he pays the carrier clearly matches the coin that heroes must render Charon, the ferryman in Hades […].33

But again he misses the point. He overstates the connection with Vergil’s Aeneid34 while understating the connection with Dante’s Inferno. What is noteworthy here is the fact that the narrator describes the ferryman as calm and composed (“перевозчик беззаботный”) and emphasizes the fact that he is experienced (“oпытный гребец”). Dante, in the Third Canto of the Inferno, describes the ferryman Charon as experienced (“ed egli a me, come persona accorta”, III, 13) and emphasizes his comforting good humour (“E poi che la sua mano a la mia puose / con lieto volto, ond’io mi confortai, / mi mise dentro a le segrete cose”; III, 19-21), making him reply calmly and courteously to his passengers’ insistent questions. The parallels to the Third Canto of the Inferno are conspicuous and hardly coincidental, especially since the Third Canto of the Inferno was the only part of Dante’s Divine Comedy of which substantial excerpts had been translated into Russian at the time of writing.35 But Kahn is wrong in thinking that any of this serves the purpose of elevating “the mental geography of the poem […] on to an allegorical plane”.36 Of course, it is not evidence of plagiarism either. The

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reason Puškin allows the narrator’s account to come so close to Dante’s is to suggest to the reader that it is based on fiction rather than fact. It is precisely by allowing this description of Evgenij crossing the Neva to be so visibly a reminiscence of this key scene in Dante’s Inferno that the author is able to make it clear that Evgenij’s experience, as reported by the narrator, is nothing more than a mental reworking of things he remembers from what he has read, a mere processing of textual memories in a dream. When the narrator first alludes to Evgenij’s homelessness he says:

[…] Ужасных дум Безмолвно полон, он скитался. Его терзал какой-то сон. Прошла неделя, месяц – он К себе домой не возвращался.

Just like “Или во сне / Он это видит?” before, the seemingly innocuous “Его терзал какой-то сон” provides a further nudge in the right direction. The author is hoping that the only seemingly incidental repetition of the verbal cue “сон” may help enforce the ironic message that Evgenij’s tribu-lations are more dream than reality. Another poignant hint at the lack of reality that pervades the account of Evgenij’s experience after he falls asleep in bed can be found in the con-frontation scene, where Evgenij appears to threaten Peter’s statue:

[…] Он мрачен стал Пред горделивым истуканом И, зубы стиснув, пальцы сжав, Как обуянный силой черной, “Добро, строитель чудотворный! – Шепнул он, злобно задрожав, – Ужо тебе!..” И вдруг стремглав Бежать пустился. Показалось Ему, что грозного царя, Мгновенно гневом возгоря, Лицо тихонько обращалось...

There is a crucial ambiguity here. Since Russian does not possess a plu-perfect, it is the reader who has to determine the sequence of actions reported by perfective past tense verbs, aided by verbal and contextual clues. When the narrator tells us that Evgenij suddenly ran off at great speed (“вдруг стремглав / Бежать пустился”) and then says that it seemed to Evgenij as if an enraged Peter had slowly turned his head (“Лицо тихонько обраща-лось”), we feel obliged to mentally reverse the order of events: not only does it seem logical to think of Evgenij’s headlong flight as a reaction to the


statue’s supernatural response; we also have the problem that, unless we do reverse the order, we are left with Evgenij running away and seeing behind him a slight movement that someone running away simply would not be able to see: to run off at breakneck speed and look intently behind you at the same time is physiologically impossible. Of course, we are still free to read the text this way, and our first instinct is to do just that, but the absence of un-ambiguous verbal cues is both remarkable and important. What the author is hoping we will realize is that, despite appearances, there is ultimately no compelling reason to reverse the order of events. He wants us to understand that he has allowed the narrator to report things in this order because this is exactly the order in which Evgenij perceived them to happen: first he was aware of himself running off at breakneck speed, then he was aware of himself seeing the statue’s reaction behind him. This may be impossible in reality because we do not have eyes in the back of our heads, but it is certainly not impossible in a dream, because in dreams, as we all know, normal perspectives do not hold: we can be ourselves and, subsequently or even simultaneously, step out of ourselves and look on ourselves from the outside; we can run away as fast as our legs can carry us and at the same time see what is going on behind us. Having said this, we should not forget that the perhaps strongest in-dication that Evgenij is dreaming is the fact that the statue suddenly comes to life. What some commentators have put down to a strange incursion of the metaphysical and fantastic into an otherwise realistic narrative is more readi-ly explained as an event in a dream, where, as we all know, the boundaries between the realistic and the fantastic are blurred. If we are prepared to accept that this scene is a dream, we can under-stand that Evgenij’s death must also be a dream, since there is no reliable indication of his having woken up in the meantime. If we have been attentive to the irony in the characterization of Evgenij, it ought not to come as a surprise that he should dream his own death. As we have already pointed out, his death wish was implicit in the way he saw the future for himself and Paraša (“И станем жить, и так до гроба / Рука с рукой дойдем мы оба / И внуки нас похоронят…”) and in the symbolism of the willow-tree that marked her putative domicile. Related to the ironic dream motif is the narrator’s early characterization of St. Petersburg as the embodiment of Peter’s “eternal dream” – a dream he hopes the nasty Finnish waves will not disturb:

Вражду и плен старинный свой Пусть волны финские забудут И тщетной злобою не будут Тревожить вечный сон Петра!

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That it is in Peter’s dream city that the dreaming Evgenij should end up los-ing his dream adds a wonderful poignancy to the irony here. The Confrontation While the poem ends with Evgenij’s supposed death, most readers consider the poem to culminate in the confrontation scene mentioned before. Because this scene is so important, let us look at it again. The key moment is without doubt Evgenij’s exclamation:

“Добро, строитель чудотворный! – Шепнул он, злобно задрожав, – Ужо тебе!..”

There has been much speculation about what exactly Evgenij meant by the unfinished “Ужо тебе!..”, and numerous continuations have been suggested. However, rather than embellishing on the poem’s strikingly laconic wording, what we should be doing is ask ourselves why we have been left to speculate. Critics have obviously felt that it matters what Evgenij actually said – or was going to say – because it could give us a clue as to his precise motivation and the precise nature of the all-important conflict. Makogonenko, Izmajlov and Makarovskaja go so far as to claim that the missing words make it impossible to understand the real meaning of the poem.37 Belinskij simply could not believe that Puškin would have omitted such an important piece of infor-mation and suggested that Evgenij’s precise words must have been edited out of the original manuscript by Žukovskij.38 His claim is pure speculation but it demonstrates a strong sense of dissatisfaction with the text: we feel that we need to know what Evgenij had in mind and precisely this information is missing. If we have learnt our lesson and understood the significant role deliberate underinterpretation plays in irony, we are well set to unravel the mystery here without the help of gratuitous assumptions. The simple truth is that the author has not allowed the narrator to report anything more than he has done because he wants the reader to put his own interpretation on it. The author is quite consciously allowing us to believe whatever we want to believe. If we have been taken in by the narrator’s sob-story about Evgenij losing his beloved Paraša in the flood, we will be inclined to see this “Ужо тебе!..” (“I’ll show you”) as a threat to the authority of the tsar, as an act of lèse-majesté bordering on rebellion. If we have understood the author’s impli-cation that Evgenij has lost nothing more than his dream, then we will find this interpretation hard to accept; however much the narrator may want us to think that Evgenij has suffered as a result of this bereavement, the essential connection to Peter’s agency is lost. As a result, we are forced to look for


another interpretation. There are two things that can help us. The first is the continuation “И вдруг стремглав / Бежать пустился” and the second is an insight gleaned from the scene where Evgenij was sitting astride the lion aping the tsar’s equestrian pose. What the author would like us to understand is that Evgenij, madly envious of the tsar’s apparent equestrian prowess and furiously eager to compete with it, has done nothing more drastic than chal-lenge the Bronze Horseman to a race, confident that his rival’s enforced im-mobility will secure him an easy victory. It is precisely because he is prepared for a race and keen to demonstrate his superiority in this absurd game of one-upmanship, that Evgenij runs off as fast as he can immediately after uttering his challenge. The Unreliable Narrator In narrative irony, the author’s attempt to distance himself from his narrator often takes the form of something I would like to call the “ironic stylization” of the narrator. What this means is that the author, from the outset, makes use of every opportunity to reveal the narrator as someone whose perspective is so eccentric that we are disinclined to take anything he says at face value. Often the ironic stylization of the narrator forms a substantial part of narra-tive irony and can lead to the irony partially “turning in on itself”, that is, being directed as much at the narrator’s curious psychological make-up as it is at the overt story-line. ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ is no exception. Though there are many ironic clues to the narrator’s eccentric sensi-bility, the point at which the reader may be expected to pick up on them will vary. One point early on in the poem where the reader might realize that something is wrong is the narrator’s portrayal of the Finnish fisherman (“финский рыболов”), whom he calls a “Печальный пасынок природы” and of whom he says: “Бросал в неведомые воды / Свой вехтий невод” (italics mine – P.B.). To call a fisherman, of all people, a “stepson of nature” is recognizably odd; a fisherman would normally be considered paradigmatic “son of nature” since he lives both with nature and from nature. As a result, we find ourselves wondering what strange understanding of “nature” this allegation is based on (perhaps nature as something whose primary function is to endow humans with the wherewithal for material success?). The narra-tor’s tendentiousness continues to manifest itself in his description of the fisherman’s activity. Fishermen do not normally fish in unknown waters but in waters where stock is known to be abundant; and they do not normally throw out decrepit nets; as we all know, when not fishing, fishermen are for-ever mending their nets, because they know their livelihood depends on the state of their nets just as much as it depends on a knowledge of the sea and an informed choice of fishing grounds.

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That there is something odd about the narrator’s perspective can also be discerned in his encomium to the life and architecture of St. Petersburg. In one sense, we are not surprised by the narrator’s praise: St. Petersburg is a magnificent city and in Puškin’s day it could match any European capital in the extravagance of its architecture and the glamour of its cosmopolitan high society; what should give us pause is both the focus of the narrator’s praise and the terms in which it is couched.39 It is hardly possible to overlook the fact that a substantial part of the narrator’s encomium is devoted to a celebration of military pomp:

Люблю воинственную живость Потешных Марсовых полей, Пехотных ратей и коней Однообразную красивость, В их стройно зыблемом строю Лоскутья сих знамен победных, Сиянье шапок этих медных, На сквозь простреленных в бою. Люблю, военная столица, Твоей твердыни дым и гром [...]

The city’s splendid architecture is given comparatively short shrift. Its palaces are mentioned but only en passant and as “громады стройные”, alongside towers or turrets, something for which St. Petersburg is not parti-cularly remarkable; also mentioned are embankments and bridges, but about these we learn only that the embankments are made of granite and have cast-iron railings, and that the bridges are suspended above the water (what else?); the granite is even mentioned twice for good measure.

Громады стройные теснятся Дворцов и башен […] […] В гранит оделася Нева; Мосты повисли над водами; […] Люблю твой строгий, стройный вид, Невы державное теченье, Береговой ее гранит, Твоих оград узор чугунный [...]

Finally the narrator refers to the streets and the Admiralty spire. We are told only that the streets are deserted and clearly visible in what may be one of St. Petersburg’s white nights, and that the famously golden Admiralty spire is bright (“светла”).


И ясны спящие громады Пустынных улиц, и светла Адмиралтейская игла [...]

If we ponder this description, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the narrator’s aesthetics are somewhat awry and that the author intends us to see this. The narrator loves military pomp, but cares little for architecture, not even the magnificent architecture of St. Petersburg. Inasmuch as he registers this architecture at all, his judgements reveal a predilection for things that come in massive chunks or blocks (“Громады стройные теснятся / Двор-цов и башен” and “cпящие громады / Пустынных улиц”; italics mine – P.B.). He has a conspicuous passion for robustness and severity: his eye is immediately attracted to granite and cast-iron; he likes things to be severe in aspect (“строгие”); and his favourite word is “стройные” (as in “Громады стройные теснятся / Дворцов и башен” or “Люблю твой […] стройный вид”; italics mine – P.B.). Indeed, so enamoured is he of “стройный” that he does not shrink from the awkward cumulation of cognates in “В их [пехотных ратей] стройно зыблемом строю” (italics mine – P.B.).40 His obvious love of military pomp ties in neatly with his predilection for towers and turrets, and, together with his unusual aesthetics, suggests that he may be something of a military fanatic. Could it therefore be that his mention of the Admiralty spire is due to more than its visual prominence? Having begun to understand that the narrator’s perspective is eccentric, we can perhaps identify the irony in the famous opening lines: “На берегу пустынных волн / Стоял Oн, дум великих полн”. The phrase “пустынных волн” is irritating – and it is meant to irritate. Medriš has suggested that the first question any reader should ask on reading the opening lines is “What is He thinking about”; Viktorova has suggested that our first question should be: “Where is He standing”.41 I would suggest that the first question a reader should ask is: “What is meant by ‘пустынных волн’?” How can waves reasonably be described as “пустынныe”? Kahn, sensing the need for an explanation, considers “пустынныe” to be an example of catachresis, but he does not say what the epithet is supposed to have been transferred from. This is not surprising, because, while “пустынный” is appropriate to describe land, it makes little obvious sense when transferred to the sea; if there is catachresis here, it would seem singularly infelicitous. But if we discount catachresis, we are left with the literal meaning, and this meaning is difficult to interpret, at least initially. This difficulty is intentional. What the author wants us to do is to ask the question we have asked and to press for an answer: if the narrator calls the waves “пустынныe”, what exactly does he expect to see on the surface of the water? For the moment there is only the question, but if we bear this question in mind, we will soon find an answer.

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To tease us, the author first provides an indication of where the answer does not lie:

[…] Пред ним широко Река неслася; бедный чёлн По ней стремился одиноко.

The author here expects us to see the semantic connection between “пу-стынных волн” and “бедный чёлн […] стремился одиноко”, and to under-stand that whatever the narrator would like to see on the waves, it is clearly not a solitary fishing boat.42 So what does he expect to see? The answer presents itself with carefully controlled ironic delay. Speaking of the newly-founded St. Petersburg, the narrator says:

Сюда по новым им волнам Все флаги в гости будут к нам, И запируем на просторе.

By having the narrator describe this vision while again referring to the waves (“по новым им волнам”), the author is mockingly revealing the idiosyn-cratic perspective in “пустынных волн” (and “бедный чёлн […] стремился одиноко”). What he is trying to tell us is that the narrator is not excessively keen on empty waves or on waves topped with nothing more than a solitary fishing-boat; he likes his waves to come adorned with lots of gaily flagged ships. In this way, the author is again covertly mocking the narrator’s ob-session with military pomp and grandeur.43 Further teasing hints at the narrator’s militaristic perspective can be found at various junctures. When the narrator describes the receding waters of the Neva, he sees them as “full of the triumph of victory” (“торжеством победы полны”); he hears the Neva breathing heavily “like a horse that has come running from the battle” (“Как с битвы прибежавший конь”); on the way to Paraša’s house he sees corpses lying all around “as if on a battlefield” (“Как будто в поле боевом”). One extremely subtle hint at the narrator’s passion for all things military can be found in the direction and elevation of Evgenij’s dreamy gaze as he sits astride the lion outside the Lobanov-Rostovskij Palace. We have already pointed out that the only thing Evgenij would be able to see from this relatively low vantage point would be the imposing buildings on the embankment opposite. What we have not yet mentioned is that all these buildings (Solov’ev House, the Manež Kadetskogo Korpusa, and Menšikov Palace) were at the time of writing (1833) given over to military use: Solov’ev House housed the Kadetskij Korpus (from 1759 to 1867), the Manež Kadetskogo Korpusa was what its name says it is, and Menšikov Palace was home to a military training school (from 1732 to 1918). By surreptitiously mapping the apparent focus of Evgenij’s romantic gaze on


to a real canvas dominated by military installations, the author is cunningly suggesting that it may be the narrator who often longingly gazes over the river, dreaming of military glory. This line of ironic stylization culminates in the description of the statue of Peter the Great. Voicing Evgenij’s thoughts, the narrator begins by prais-ing Peter’s proud and powerful forehead only to move on immediately to the fieriness of his horse. This is not suspicious in itself, but when he addresses the horse and Peter in the same breath, we can sense the tongue in the author’s cheek. It would be difficult to bring out the narrator’s undue pre-occupation with horses better than by having him treat horse and tsar in such an indiscriminate manner. The finest point in this irony is the cunningly interspersed “O мощный властелин судьбы!”. On reading this phrase, we are for a brief moment unsure whether it is not the horse that is the “powerful commander of fate”; a cavalryman’s fate would, after all, depend quite substantially on the performance of his horse. It is only when we read on – in fact, only when we reach “уздой железной / Россию поднял на дыбы?” – that we are forced to understand that the “commander of fate” is none other than the Tsar. However, this fleeting uncertainty is enough to bring out even more poignantly the unclear dividing line between horse and tsar in the narrator’s thinking. Puškin has of course been careful not to take the irony too far: the tsar is not compromised any more than absolutely necessary to get the ironic point across. Having understood that the author is mocking the narrator’s per-spective, we should now have not too much difficulty in seeing the ironic import of:

И блеск, и шум, и говор балов, А в час пирушки холостой Шипенье пенистых бокалов И пунша пламень голубой.

The narrator here is made to reveal himself as a wealthy bachelor who is used to cosmopolitan high living; he is partial to grand balls and champagne-and-punch bachelor parties (the Feuerzangenbowle that his “пунша пламень голубой” calls to mind was traditionally the drink of German student Bur-schenschaften). The idea that the narrator is a wealthy snob receives covert support later on. Contemplating what the flood waters are carrying through the city, he speaks of “Пожитки бледной нищеты”. Notice the gentle se-mantic tension between “пожитки” and “нищетa”: strictly speaking, some-one who is “нищий” is destitute and so would not have any belongings (“пожитки”) to speak of. This tension can suggest that the narrator is over-eager to classify as “нищий” anyone who is significantly less well-off than himself. This in turn makes us wonder whether what the narrator seems able

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to identify so confidently as “Oбломки хижин” are really no more than bits of wooden shacks. The mention of punch can also prompt another irony. If we remember that Coleridge valued punch for its hallucinogenic potency, we may find ourselves wondering just how reliable the outpourings of a punch-swigging narrator are likely to be. However, some aspects of the covert stylization of the narrator are virtually inaccessible on a first reading. Here is an example from the pro-logue:

Люблю зимы твоей жестокой Недвижный воздух и мороз, Бег санок вдоль Невы широкой, Девичьи лица ярче роз [...]

We cannot understand the irony here until we have encountered the narrator’s remarks about the weather that play such an important role later on. We have already mentioned their primary ironic function, which is to alert us to the fact that Evgenij is incorporating sounds heard in his sleep into his dream. But these references to the weather also have another ironic function. That the narrator is forever going on about the wind and the rain, even when the wind is most remarkable for its moaning and the rain is merely dripping (“Дождь капал, ветер выл уныло”) is meant to betray his wimpish dislike of inclement weather. We can see that “ненастный” is a key word in his voca-bulary. When Evgenij comes home in the early hours, the narrator comments: “Редеет мгла ненастной ночи / И бледный день уж настает... / Ужасный день!” When he pictures Evgenij sleeping rough on the quay in early autumn, the first thing that comes to his mind is “Дышал / Ненастный ветер”, an expression in any case more reminiscent of a gentleman temporarily incom-moded by the elements than it is evocative of a homeless man’s desperate plight; notice particularly the disparity between “Дышал / […] ветер” and “Ненастный”: a really nasty wind would surely have to do more than simply дышать. Perhaps the most significant, but at the same time perhaps the most delicate, hint at the narrator’s attitude to the weather lies in something we mentioned before: the narrator’s conspicuous failure to mention the wintry cold that we would normally consider to have been the principal hardship facing a homeless Evgenij. Here too the irony has a double edge: one aspect of the irony is the implication that Evgenij is actually warmly tucked up in bed; another is the implication that the narrator, who would after all like us to believe that Evgenij really is homeless, is incapable of even imagining what unguarded exposure to the elements would actually be like. As we said before, the only mention of cold in this connection is the chilling touch of the railings. This too has a double edge: it allows the author to suggest that the only cold the sleeping Evgenij would be subjected to is the chill of air on his


uncovered forehead; but it also allows the author to imply that cold railings are the closest the narrator can get to imagining biting frost. It is only when we understand the full extent of the narrator’s oversensitivity to the weather that we begin to realize that there is something decidedly odd about the narrator’s professed love of harsh winters in the passage just quoted. Some-one who is put out by a puff of wind and a few drops of rain and whose imagination cannot encompass extreme cold is unlikely to appreciate the rigours of winter. The author is aware of this and is careful to provide the necessary qualifications. The first is of course “Недвижный воздух”, which makes it clear that the narrator only likes winter if there is no wind, which in maritime St. Petersburg is not very often. The second proviso is more care-fully concealed. By having the narrator add a description of rosy-cheeked young ladies on sledges on the icebound Neva, the author is suggesting that the narrator likes winter only when it affects others more than it does himself and when it can be observed from a comfortable indoor perspective. That the narrator is in fact not as enamoured of winter as he would like us to believe, and is indeed quite happy to see the back of it, comes out in in his description of Neva’s breaking ice:

[…] взломав свой синий лед, Нева к морям его несет И, чуя вешни дни, ликует.

We cannot help suspecting that it is not just the river that rejoices at the ad-vent of spring. Once we have picked up on the narrator’s squeamish dislike of the elements, we can readily identify other ironic indicators pointing in the same direction. We realize that “Ногою твердой стать при море”, referring to Peter’s plan to build his coastal metropolis, probably owes less to original metaphor than it does to the narrator’s weak-kneed fear of water. This in turn prompts us to suspect that “Мосты повисли над водами”, that seemed so platitudinous on our first encounter with it, may be the veiled expression of an irrational fear of water (and heights?) that leads the narrator to see stone bridges as constructs precariously “suspended” over the depths below. We even find ourselves wondering whether the emphasis on stickiness in “По мшистым, топким берегам” and “из топи блат” is not due more to the nar-rator’s distaste for any wet, mucky stuff that might cling to his nicely po-lished shoes than it is to the force of his poetic imagination. That the narrator’s fastidiousness extends to matters of personal attire also comes through in his many remarks about clothing. The first such remark is found in his portrayal of the soldiers parading on the Martian fields:

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В их стройно зыблемом строю Лоскутья сих знамен победных, Сиянье шапок этих медных, На сквозь простреленных в бою.

Here again, the irony is virtually inaccessible on a first reading. However, once we have been alerted to the narrator’s fastidiousness, we can begin to discern the ironic fault lines in the description. The narrator likes things to be стройный, a notion that, as we said before, is ironically emphasized by the harsh cumulation of cognates in “В их стройно зыблемом строю”. How-ever, despite the narrator’s juxtaposition of стройно and зыблемый in “[в] стройно зыблемом [строю]” – or precisely because of it – we cannot help feeling that there is a tension here: the rippling motion of the uniforms even of soldiers marching perfectly in step is unlikely to be completely controlled and regular, and so runs contrary to the notion of orderliness in “стройно”. What the author intends us to see here is that the narrator has felt obliged to add стройно to зыблемый precisely because he is disturbed by the rippling of the uniforms and is anxious to avoid the impression that this rippling might be construed as disorderly. Indeed, the very fact that he mentions the rippling of the uniforms at all shows that his eye is drawn to anything that is not as rigid and orderly as he would like it to be, to anything that he feels is not quite comme il faut. The same ironic consideration implicitly motivates the reference to the ragged flags and the holes in the helmets. Of course the nar-rator is pleased that the army was victorious and of course he warmly ap-preciates the shiny bronze of the helmets, but you can sense his preoccu-pation and concern that the flags are in tatters and the helmets are full of holes. His eye is irresistibly drawn to these imperfections and he cannot help registering them, even if he tries to pass them off as picturesque detail and as a sign of heroism. The narrator’s dislike of slovenly and otherwise unseemly attire is brought out mainly in his description of Evgenij’s clothing. In the scene on Senate Square where Evgenij is pictured sitting astride a marble lion with the flood waters at his feet, the narrator is careful to note that Evgenij has lost his hat: “ветер, буйно завывая, / С него и шляпу вдруг сорвал”, as if losing a hat were of any consequence to someone allegedly stranded in a raging flood. The narrator’s sartorial preoccupations come to the fore even more clearly when he describes Evgenij’s clothing as a tramp:

Одежда ветхая на нем Рвалась и тлела.

It is not just that the narrator considers the unsurprising wear and tear to Evgenij’s clothing worth mentioning but the terms in which he does so that should arouse our suspicion. Notice the disparity between the trivial


“[Одежда] Рвалась” and the melodramatic “[Одежда] тлела”: torn clothing is commonplace but clothing rotting on the body is so unusual that it strains our credibility. What the author is trying to get us to see here is that not only is the narrator disturbed by the supposed state of Evgenij’s clothing, but his imagination, tied to a world of fastidious elegance, cannot even begin to en-compass the reality of someone who does not have a fresh change of clothes every day. Remember too the description of Evgenij sheepishly passing the Bronze Horseman after the dramatic chase:

[…] К сердцу своему Он прижимал поспешно руку, Как бы его смиряя муку, Картуз изношенный сымал, Смущенных глаз не подымал И шел сторонкой.

The narrator simply cannot help himself: he just has to point out that Evge-nij’s peaked cap is worn (“изношенный”). The same carping fussiness is also revealed elsewhere. Describing Pa-raša’s home as seen (or dreamt) by Evgenij sitting astride the lion, the nar-rator finds it necessary to point out the fence is unpainted (“Забор некра-шеный”). Depicting Evgenij’s homelessness, he cannot help drawing our attention to the fact that Evgenij is wandering about on foot (“пешком”). Describing the fisherman who comes to the island where Evgenij’s body is said to be found, he just has to tell us that the fisherman is late for dinner (“Причалит с неводом туда / Рыбак на ловле запоздалый / И бедный ужин свой варит”) – and so on. It is also implied that the narrator is spiteful and cantankerous. When he points out that Peter built St. Petersburg as a bastion against the Swedes, we cannot help feeling that his “На зло надменному соседу” resonates with more than a sense of historical enmity; finding his neighbours conceited and doing things to spite them may well be part of his everyday experience. Consider also the way he describes the waves washing against the quay that he imagines the homeless Evgenij to be sleeping on:

[…] Мрачный вал Плескал на пристань, ропща пени И бьясь об гладкие ступени, Как челобитчик у дверей Ему не внемлющих судей.

Again, we cannot help thinking that the simile of the petitioner at the door of unsympathetic judges owes more to the narrator’s experience of obsessive intercession and litigation than it does to the sound of the waves.

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The narrator’s idiosyncratic psychology is also brought out in the comparison of the flood waters to gangs of thieves:

Осада! приступ! злые волны, Как воры, лезут в окна.

and later on, at much greater length: Нева обратно повлеклась, Своим любуясь возмущеньем И покидая с небреженьем Свою добычу. Так злодей, С свирепой шайкою своей В село ворвавшись, ломит, режет, Крушит и грабит; вопли, скрежет, Насилье, брань, тревога, вой!.. И, грабежом отягощенны, Боясь погони, утомленны, Спешат разбойники домой, Добычу на пути роняя.

These passages are very dramatic – indeed, they are among the most dramatic in the entire poem – but their dramatic quality is treacherous. What the author expects us to realize is that the narrator is never more excited than he is at this point; observe the exclamation marks and the staccato rhythm of his breathless enumerations (“Осада! приступ! злые волны” and “Так злодей […] ломит, режет, / Крушит и грабит; вопли, скрежет, / Насилье, брань, тревога, вой!..”), and notice how the extended metaphor takes over and acquires a life of its own. We can see that the narrator has become so worked up that he is carried away by the terms of his own comparison. But that is precisely the point. For the author, the narrator’s frenzy is due not so much to the rapacity of the flood as it is to the narrator’s paranoid fear of robbers and thieves. The narrator, we are meant to understand, has burglars “on the brain”; nothing galls him more than the thought of crooks making off with his (or anyone else’s) possessions. It has been hinted at before that the narrator is a wealthy bachelor, so it no longer requires a giant leap of the imagination to think of him living alone in a large house full of valuable possessions, obsessed with the threat of burglary. There are many other passages that tell us more about the narrator than they do about any external reality. Consider the portrayal of Evgenij’s home-lessness in:

[…] питался В окошко поданным куском. Одежда ветхая на нем


Рвалась и тлела. Злые дети Бросали камни вслед ему. Нередко кучерские плети Его стегали, потому Что он не разбирал дороги Уж никогда; казалось – он Не примечал. Он оглушен Был шумом внутренней тревоги.

That children might throw stones at a hapless tramp out of sheer spite is not inconceivable. But when this outrageous behaviour is presented as if it were a natural consequence of Evgenij’s homelessness, just like his dependency on alms and the state of his clothing, we are right to be suspicious. We begin to wonder whether the spitefulness attributed to the children is not a projection of the narrator’s own spitefulness or perhaps even a reflection of his expe-rience of the kind of incensed reaction his own carping attitude causes. The narrator’s claim is further defused by “вслед ему”, which invites us to con-clude that the stones might in any case have fallen far short of the victim and might not even have been aimed at him. The narrator’s claim that Evgenij was repeatedly lashed by passing coachmen because he had lost his way is equally suspect. In the early days of horse-drawn coach transportation in towns pedestrians were often hit, and sometimes even killed, by coachmen’s whips, but this happened by accident, as a result of the narrowness of streets and the length of the horse-whips. That the narrator should think of the coachmen as deliberately whipping Evgenij suggests that he takes a rather dim view of cabbies. That the narrator’s claim is tendentious comes through especially in his use of “плеть”, which normally refers not to a horse-whip but to the much shorter many-tailed whip used for flogging peasants and children (плеть-девятихвостка is the equivalent of our cat-o’-nine-tails). This creates the ridiculously exaggerated picture of cabbies giving Evgenij a good old flogging for his sins. That it is Evgenij’s lack of orientation that has given rise to the coachmen’s ire initially raises more questions than it answers. Is Evgenij crossing the road without looking? But, as we know from experience, people who cross the road without looking rarely do so because they do not know where they going; the problem is that they usually know exactly where they are going and are over-eager to get there. Is Evgenij weaving about, stepping on and off the pavement as he walks? But again, weaving about is not something we normally associate with someone who has lost his bearings; people who have lost their way may look around, stop, retrace their steps, look round again – but they do not normally stumble around like drunkards. It is only when we consider the precise wording of “дороги не разбирал уж никогда” that we begin to suspect what is really at issue. The phrase “уж никогда” can support both the surface reading that

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Evgenij has lost his bearings as a consequence of his derangement (taking “уж” as a temporal уже) but it can also support the underlying ironic reading that he never did know where he was going (taking “уж” as an emphatic particle). What this means only becomes clear when we realize that here too the narrator’s tendentious account of what is happening to Evgenij is telling us more about the narrator than about the reality he is allegedly describing. What the author would like us to understand is that, for the narrator, there is a very definite connection between not knowing where one is going and the ire of coachmen, but it has nothing to do with Evgenij’s behaviour as a pedestrian; the connection lies in the fact that the narrator knows from his frequent experience as a passenger that nothing angers coachmen more than someone like himself who does not know where on earth he is going and so keeps on giving erroneous directions. That we should not take the beatings Evgenij supposedly received too seriously is brought out in two ways. First, the reference to “плеть”, which the narrator used to dramatize the lashings, actually trivializes them, since the whip in question would be far too short to reach a pedestrian from the height of a cabbie’s seat. Second, more im-portantly, the use of “оглушен […] шумом внутренней тревоги” to explain Evgenij’s apparent failure to notice the alleged blows suggests that his impassivity may be due more to his inability to hear the whip lashes than to his inability to feel them, perhaps because they are far more remarkable for their sound than for their impact; the verb oглушить can mean both “to stun” and “to deafen”, but the insertion of “шумом” subversively pushes the meaning more in the direction of “to deafen”. Another passage worth exploring in this connection is the narrator’s description of the aftermath of the flood:

В порядок прежний всё вошло. Уже по улицам свободным С своим бесчувствием холодным Ходил народ. Чиновный люд, Покинув свой ночной приют, На службу шел. Торгаш отважный, Не унывая, открывал Невой ограбленный подвал, Сбираясь свой убыток важный На ближнем выместить. С дворов Свозили лодки. Граф Хвостов, Поэт, любимый небесами, Уж пел бессмертными стихами Несчастье невских берегов.


That the enthusiastic reference to Chvostov is ironic has been widely recog-nized. It is hardly likely that a poet of Puškin’s calibre and status would be sincerely praising an obscure versifier like Chvostov and so we are driven to recast the meaning in the conventional ironic praise-for-blame mould. That the preceding description of чиновники going about their business is equally ironic has been consistently overlooked, perhaps because it is not cast in the same praise-for-blame mould and because it seems rather more plausible that a poet of distinction might be sincerely criticizing ordinary people, especially merchants and bureaucrats. But we should not be taken in by the narrator’s rhetoric. What the author wants us to realize is that the narrator’s criticism of the people is as irrational as his praise of Chvostov. For any sane person, there is nothing wrong with people returning to work after a catastrophe; on the contrary, it is in everybody’s interest, even that of the bereaved, that the normal functioning of society resume as soon as possible. The author presses home his point with “по улицам свободным”, which makes it clear that there is no reason for the people not to go about their business, and with “С своим бесчувствием холодным”, in which the allegation of hard-hearted-ness is implicitly exaggerated: we can say “с бесчувствием” and “с холод-ным сердцем”, but the indiscriminate combination of the two smacks of ranting overstatement. The criticism of the shopkeeper is equally unsustain-able, as the author would like us to realize. We are not told how the shop-keeper is supposed to be cheating his customers and it is difficult to imagine how he could be. If his shop has been flooded, most of his wares would have been severely damaged, if not ruined. How could he palm these goods off on unsuspecting customers? The damage would surely be visible and the customer free to reject the goods. Are we to imagine that the shopkeeper would charge exorbitant prices for any goods still undamaged? But again, the customer would be free to negotiate a more reasonable price or go elsewhere. We can of course try to construct elaborate scenarios that would render the narrator’s claim more credible – or we can begin to see that it is precisely the lack of any overt explanation that makes the narrator’s claim suspect. The author’s scepticism is underscored by “Сбираясь [свой убыток важный / На ближнем выместить]”, which makes it clear that the shopkeeper in question has not yet done anything at all and leads us to suspect that the narrator’s claim is based on more than speculation and preconceived ideas than on fact. The narrator’s snobbish disdain for чиновники finds ironic reinforce-ment in the final scene of the poem where he has a чиновник spending his Sunday on a deserted and barren island, as if that were the best form of Sun-day entertainment a mere чиновник might hope for:

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Или чиновник посетит, Гуляя в лодке в воскресенье, Пустынный остров. Не взросло Там ни былинки.

The narrator’s attitude to merchants, though characterized by suspicion and mistrust, still allows for the possibility of decent and upright behaviour. We may remember that among the items he claims to have seen in the flood waters was what he called “Товар запасливой торговли” (italics mine – P.B.). This suggests that the narrator approves of merchants as long as they meet his exacting standards of thriftiness. Another feature of the narrator’s ironic make-up is the importunate reli-giosity that motivates his use of the religiously marked “смиренный” (“Приют смиренный и простой”), his melodramatic comparison of the ris-ing flood to the apocalypse (“Народ / Зрит божий гнев и казни ждет”) and the conspicuous similarity between his vision of the homeless Evgenij and the traditional religious image of the Holy Fool (self-imposed homelessness and poverty, other-worldliness, wandering, dependence on alms etc.):

Евгений за своим добром Не приходил. Он скоро свету Стал чужд. Весь день бродил пешком, А спал на пристани; питался В окошко поданным куском. […] Ужасных дум Безмолвно полон, он скитался.

This obsessive religiosity is also reflected in his use of the Old Testament terms кумир (“Кумир с простертою рукою / Сидел на бронзовом коне” and “Кругом подножия кумира / Безумец бедный обошел”) and истукан (“Oн мрачен стал / Пред горделивым истуканом”) to describe the statue.44 There may even be a connection between this markedly religious characterization of the statue and the puzzling “медный” in ‘Mednyj vsadnik’. Numerous critics have asked why the Bronze Horseman is referred to throughout as the Brass Horseman, when it is well-known – and must have been known to Puškin – that Falconet’s statue is made of bronze.45 The answer could be that we are meant to understand “медный” as an allusion to the image of the brazen serpent created by Moses to protect his people (Numbers 21:4-9), then destroyed in an iconoclastic campaign by David’s son Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:1-4), and are therefore meant to see it as a further oblique reference to the narrator’s religiosity. There may be another hint at Old Testament imagery in the comparison of Moscow’s lapse from power to


an imperial widow’s loss of standing, which forms part of the narrator’s en-comium to St. Petersburg in the prologue.

И перед младшею столицей Померкла старая Москва, Как перед новою царицей Порфироносная вдова.

This comparison is reminiscent of the way the fallen Jerusalem is likened to a dispossessed and demeaned widow in the memorable opening to the Book of Lamentations.

How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people how is she be-come as a widow she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary. (Lamentations 1:1)46

Other aspects of the narrator’s ironic make-up are his fatalism and cynicism, coupled, as they often are, with a naive animism that manifests it-self in indiscriminate and trite personification. The narrator’s fatalism comes through in his characterization of St. Petersburg as city with a destiny (“При-родой здесь нам суждено / В Европу прорубить окно”) and, together with his tendency to personify, in his description of Evgenij’s quest to find Paraša (“ждет его / Судьба с неведомым известьем / Как с запечатанным пись-мом”). The narrator’s tendency to engage in trite and childishly melodrama-tic personification is brought out at every opportunity. The description of the flood abounds in examples of personification coupled with negative emotion: the rain beats down angrily, the wind howls sadly or wails despondently, the river seethes with rage, angry waves rise from indignant depths, gloomy waves grumble, waves rebel irately, and so on. The expression here is too trite and too childish to be serious poetic metaphor, and the author hopes we will realize this. He also hopes we may chuckle at the odd conflation of the literal and the metaphorical in “Над омраченным Петроградом”, which leaves us unsure whether we are to think of St. Petersburg as being cloud-hung or as having a darkened brow. The narrator’s overeagerness to perso-nify is also brought out in his repeated apostrophes of inanimate objects (St. Petersburg, the Bronze Horseman, even the Bronze Horseman’s horse). It is worth noting at this point that the personification of all and sundry serves not only to mock the narrator but also to subvert the sense of drama and pathos he is trying to create, as we shall see presently. There is also a strong implication that the narrator is obsequiously pro-tsarist and thus inclined to idealize the tsar and his family, past and present. As we have already seen, he is quick to compare outclassed Moscow to a tsar’s widow eclipsed by the new tsarina. He expresses a passionate hope that

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the nasty Finnish waves will not disturb Peter the Great’s eternal dream. More tellingly, he has Tsar Alexander ruefully reflect on his inability to con-trol the elements (“С божией стихией / Царям не совладеть”), as if a tsar could ever have authority over the weather. The narrator’s mindless adulation of imperial authority also comes through in his swooning “Стоял Oн” in the opening lines: Peter the Great – like God – is simply He. The strongest indication of the narrator’s obsequious reverence for Peter the Great lies in his use of кумир and истукан to describe Peter’s statue. While these mani-festly biblical terms betray the narrator’s moral reservations about the statue, they also make it irresistibly clear that what is troubling the narrator is that, for him, this likeness of Peter is on a par with a likeness of God.47 The narrator’s predilection for Church Slavonicisms (глава, брег, блато, град, хлад/хладный, стогна, полнощный, etc.) and Old Russian words (краса, пловец, небрежение, недвижный, твердыня, etc.) is notice-able throughout and has often been remarked on. Archaicisms of this kind are not uncommon in poetic language, but their use here sits uneasily with the conversational rhythms and colloquialisms elsewhere in the text. The tension is sufficient to give the narrator’s language an identifiably idiosyncratic edge, allowing the author to mark him out as an inveterate traditionalist, as a pedantic old fogey with a hankering for antiquated forms. His use, in the prologue, of forms strongly reminiscent of the classical ode intensifies this impression. That this linguistic traditionalism is coupled with a purist aver-sion to Gallicisms comes through in the clumsy and ridiculously affected use of “шапка медная” for the established каска (< Fr. “casque”). Other Ironies In this last section, I would like to consider some instructive passages whose multiple ironies could not readily be accommodated in any of the above sections and which may in any case be difficult to penetrate on a first or even second reading. In all cases, the major focus of the irony is the subversion of the narrator’s attempts at drama and pathos. At first sight, the pathos in the following lines is worthy of Coleridge:

И лес, неведомый лучам В тумане спрятанного солнца, Кругом шумел.

By making us think of forests which the light of the sun cannot penetrate, the narrator is trying hard to create a picture of awe-inspiring sublimity. The author meanwhile is neatly subverting his attempt by inserting the tell-tale “спрятанного [солнца]” and by hinting at the existence of mist-dispersing wind in “Кругом шумел [лес]”. What the author would like us to understand


is that the only reason the sunlight is unable to penetrate the forest is that the sun is temporarily obscured. In this way, the narrator’s attempt at awe-inspiring sublimity is implicitly reduced to crushing banality. Eremin is clear-ly aware of the semantic tension between “спрятанного [солнца]” and the would-be sublime image of the forest, but he fails to spot the irony; instead he develops an elaborate scenario to explain the apparent contradiction away:

Не сегодня только или, допустим, не только в эту ненастную неделю туман спрятал солнце: его лучи никогда не проглядывают в лес – туман висит над ним постоянно, потому что он, лес, стоит “среди болот”, а туман порожден болотами.48

His interpretative manoеuvering is ingenious and indicative of the lengths to which the “highly sophisticated reader” (to use Booth’s term again) will go to rescue the surface meaning he chooses not to question. The description of the flood waters is continuously subverted. Let us return to the waves threatening Evgenij as he sits astride the lion. We have already pointed out how the reference to a rising wave that licks the bottom of the sole of his shoe implicitly attenuates the sense of menace. This subversive trivialization is maintained in what follows:

[…] Словно горы, Из возмущенной глубины Вставали волны там и злились, Там буря выла, там носились Обломки...

Notice how the potentially impressive “горы” is covertly weakened by the addition of “Из […] глубины”, the alleged height of the “mountains” being ironically cancelled out by the depths from which they are said to rise. The subversive effect of this is compounded by the “там” in “Вставали волны там и злились”. At first, we attach no great importance to this “там”: it seems to mean something like “out there”. It is only when “там” is repeated in the combination “Там буря выла, там носились / Обломки...” (italics mine – P.B.) that this first, initially expansive, “там” suddenly finds itself reduced to localized particularity; we suddenly realize that high waves are not everywhere, nor, even more surprisingly, is the storm. Interestingly too, even “волны […] злились” and “буря выла” contribute to the irony because the naive animistic metaphor in “волны […] злились” again hints at the narra-tor’s predilection for childish fantasy and picture-book imagery. Consider also the following description of townsfolk watching the ris-ing waters:

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Любуясь брызгами, горами И пеной разъяренных вод. Но силой ветров от залива Перегражденная Нева Обратно шла, гневна, бурлива, И затопляла острова, Погода пуще свирепела, Нева вздувалась и ревела, Котлом клокоча и клубясь, И вдруг, как зверь остервенясь, На город кинулась [...]

Again, the potentially impressive reference to mountains is subverted, this time by having “горами” straddled by the conspicuously weaker “брызгами” and “пеной”; and again, naive personification turns the description towards picture-book imagery: “[пена] разъяренных [вод]”; “[Нева] Обратно шла, гневна, бурлива, / И затопляла острова”. The vision of the Neva as angry woman stomping off in a rage and putting islands under water as she goes is more comically grotesque than genuinely menacing. We should of course not miss the irony in “Но силой ветров от залива / Перегражденная Нева / Обратно шла”. High winds do not dam up rivers nor do they cause them to recede in a head-on confrontation, as the narrator is alleging.49 The drama-tically simplified image can be thought of as a poetic figure, but it can also be seen as a covert reminder of the narrator’s wimpish dislike of wind and weather. Nor should we miss the ironic force of the imperfective “зато-пляла”, which fails to make it clear whether the islands were wholly flooded as a result. The narrator’s credibility is not helped by “Погода пуще свире-пела”. The verb cвирепеть normally describes an extreme and therefore cannot be modified by a comparative like “пуще”. By letting the narrator do this nonetheless, the author is implying that for the narrator cвирепеть does not have the force we normally attribute to it. Equally suspicious is his claim that the waters are heaving (“Нева вздувалась и ревела / Котлом клокоча и клубясь”). Both вздуваться and клубиться are more appropriate to rising air than heaving waters, while the image of the gurgling cauldron again takes us back to the fairy-tale land of children’s picture-books. The following description of the waves ploughing their way through the town fares no better.

[…] Челны С разбега стекла бьют кормой. Лотки под мокрой пеленой, Обломки хижин, бревны, кровли, Товар запасливой торговли, Пожитки бледной нищеты,


Грозой снесенные мосты, Гроба с размытого кладбища Плывут по улицам!

We have already commented on the irony in “Обломки хижин, […] / Товар запасливой торговли” and “Пожитки бледной нищеты”. Let us pause for a moment to consider the rest of this passage. We begin with boats that are merely hitting windows, not smashing them (“стекла бьют”), and are able to do this only by coming at the windows from a distance (“С разбега”) and by hitting the windows not with the bow, as they would do if their forward movement were intensified by the storm, but with the stern, which suggests exactly the opposite. Then we have a list of items the waters are allegedly carrying with them. At first sight, this list is quite impressive, even if we already have reservations about some of the items. But we do not need to inquire too far into the precise nature of the flotsam because, as the narrator is careless enough to admit, it is all “под мокрой пеленой”, that is under the veil of the water, which naturally raises the question of its visibility. Are we to conclude that the narrator is merely speculating about things he cannot really see? Coffins washed up from a cemetery seem rather unlikely.50 The narrator intends this detail to be the dramatic culmination of the passage before us, but we are more inclined to think of it as a piece of melodramatic fantasy. What is more, by having coffins swept along by the flood, the nar-rator is weakening his case rather than strengthening it: corpses of victims of the flood might have impressed us, the corpses of those long since dead lack elemental significance. That the narrator is making things up also comes through in “Грозой снесенные мосты”. While flood waters may bring down stone bridges, storms qua storms, however unpleasant they may be for the narrator, do not. Wherever the narrator tries to impress us with dramatic imagery, he is allowed to fail. Consider the description of the receding waters as Evgenij prepares to set out in search of Paraša:

Еще кипели злобно волны, Как бы под ними тлел огонь, Еще их пена покрывала [...]

And notice the way the narrator’s claim that the waters are still simmering menacingly is weakened rather than strengthened by “под ними тлел огонь”. Even if we are willing to believe that a dying fire is enough to make a liquid simmer, we still have a problem, which is that “Еще кипели […] волны” and “тлел огонь” are pointing in opposite directions: “Еще кипели […] волны” wants us to think of the action as forcefully continuing while “тлел огонь” makes it clear that it is petering out. The narrator’s failure here may

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be slight but it is repeated failures of this kind that give ironic interpretation its foothold. One of the most dramatic pictures of the aftermath of the flood shares a similar fate. As Evgenij rushes to find Paraša, the narrator describes the de-struction the flood has wreaked:

Всё перед ним завалено; Что сброшено, что снесено; Скривились домики, другие Совсем обрушились, иные Волнами сдвинуты; кругом, Как будто в поле боевом, Тела валяются.

The narrator starts off with a resounding “Всё перед ним завалено”, which seems impressive enough. His “Что сброшено, что снесено” is then presu-mably meant to add graphic detail. The only problem is that this detail is not as graphic as it initially appears. It is difficult to make any real sense of the distinction betweeen “сброшено” and “снесено” when applied to a storm. Are we to think of varying trajectories or differences in the amount of force applied? But what significance can this have when everything is already lying on the ground? There would, after all, be no clearly identifiable correlation between the damage seen and the precise way it came about. By puzzling us in this way, the author is encouraging us to seek an alternative rationale for “Что сброшено, что снесено” and is hoping we may find it in the narrator’s prissiness. If we stop to think about it, and consider what we have already learnt about the narrator, we cannot help feeling that “Что сброшено, что снесено” sounds more like the comment a fussy gentleman might make after his housemaid has finished tidying and airing his study. Irritated by her energetic incursion into his painstakingly ordered world, he carefully notes which things have been carelessly knocked over and which things have been allowed to blow away in the draught from carelessly opened windows. The following “Скривились домики, другие / Совсем обрушились, иные / Волнами сдвинуты” seems to add more graphic detail, only this time the narrator’s failure to impress is even more conspicuous. From what went immediately before we had innocently assumed that everything had been completely destroyed; now we suddenly learn that many houses are still standing albeit damaged. This revelation acts as an ironic anti-climax that subverts the narrator’s initial all-embracing “Всё перед ним завалено”. Of course, the “highly sophisticated reader” will probably find some way of rescuing the surface reading, perhaps by arguing that Evgenij was first com-pletely overwhelmed by the destruction and only later began to see the more detailed picture. Since irony refuses to force itself on the reader, it can of


course always be resisted. The “highly sophisticated reader” might also point to the dramatic nature of the subsequent reference to the corpses strewn all around. But again there is a hitch. The author is giving us no guarantee that the bodies lying on the ground are corpses. The compounding of “как” and “будто” in “Как будто в поле боевом” implicitly weakens the comparison with corpses in the battlefield by making it just a touch more hypothetical, and common sense tells us that these bodies might just as easily be the bodies of people sleeping rough because they are unable or afraid to return home. In this connection, we do well to remember the narrator’s previous failure to provide us with convincing casualties in the image of the drifting coffins. Contributory to the irony here is also the narrator’s “[Тела] валяются”. This could mean that the bodies are lying crumpled and twisted on the ground as corpses might be or it may do no more than voice the narrator’s stern dis-approval of people lazing about. As we have seen, ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ is suffused with irony. This irony is not Romantic irony, but an “irony of Romanticism” (“ирония романтики” – to use Roman Jakobson’s phrase),51 achieved by using conventional narrative irony. If we recognize this irony, we can see that ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ is not a moral-political exemplum but a delightful conceit, an amused and amusing reflection on the Romantic fascination with dreams, especially the popular Romantic dictum that dreams are akin to madness.52 It is the playful un-masking of a half-baked sob-story told by a cranky narrator about a character he has dreamt up who in Peter’s dream city dreams that he has lost his dream. Lovers of “high seriousness” in literature will be disappointed; so will scholars who thought they could “crack” the poem by throwing the full weight of their erudition at it. Other readers may, however, take pleasure in a work of rare genius. To achieve a complex narrative irony of this kind in verse requires exceptional poetic talent: it requires a control of language that does not need to make any visible concession to metre and rhyme; it requires a level of effortless mastery that only the greatest poet can achieve. Where there are gains, there are also losses. If readers of Russian can delight in the poem’s subtlety and sophistication, readers having to rely on translation are doomed to frustration, at least for the moment. Even a cursory look at the main translations shows that the ironic structure has been largely obscured by the fudging, deformation or elimination of important ironic cues.53 It has always been acknowledged that translating Puškin’s verse adequately is hugely challenging. The need to convey the subtle narrative irony in ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ adds an obstacle to successful translation that must defeat any translator unaware of the irony and may even prove insurmount-able when the irony is recognized. In any case, it looks like we will have to start again.

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Epilogue The narrator’s ironic make-up is so idiosyncratic that we are inclined to wonder whether the narrator may not have been modelled on a real person. Though there is no pressing need for any such identification (irony, unlike parody, can and should be understood without reference to an external model), I am tempted to make a speculative proposal. I suggest that Puškin may have partially modelled his ironic narrator on Aleksandr Semenovič Šiškov (1754-1841), a highly influential public figure whose views on lan-guage and literature Puškin satirized as a member of “Arzamas” and who is already the butt of irony in Evgenij Onegin: “Oна казалась верный снимок / Du comme il faut… / (Шишков, прости: / Не знаю как перевести)” (chap-ter 8, stanza 14, lines 12-14). Fortunately character, attitudes and beliefs of Šiškov are well-documented.54 Šiškov was: – a senior naval officer, but more of a theoretician than a practitioner; – scatter-brained, forgetful,55 and notorious for his poor navigational skills (famously, he managed to shipwreck a vessel under his command on the Danish island of Bornholm, killing most of his crew and leaving himself and a handful of survivors stranded in Scandinavia for over a year); – devoutly religious, having been reared on the standard tracts of Russian Orthodoxy;56 – of sickly disposition and over-sensitive to wind, rain and draughts – “малейшая простуда надолго повергала его в постель и плохо переносил ветер, дождь, сквозняки”;57 – very much the “indoor type”, even a recluse, in later life emerging from his study only twice a week to keep his compulsory hours (“присутст-венные дни”) at the Admiralty;58 – a pedagogue with a mission, writing edifying stories and rhymes for children (hence the narrator’s view of children?); – staunchly pro-tsarist – “искренне верил, что цари от Бога, и был предан всею душою царскому сану, благоговел перед ним” (hence the narrator’s adulation of the Tsar?);59 – a great admirer of Lomonosov’s well-known ‘Ode to Peter the Great’60 (hence the narrator’s use of the odic form and his swooning adula-tion of both man and statue?); – the advocate of a Russian idiom rich in Slavonicisms and an oppo-nent of contemporary loanwords from French;61 – the head of a censorship board popularly dubbed “Чугунный устав” (hence the emphasis on cast-iron in the narrator’s aesthetics?); – given to carping and fault-finding;62 – inclined to be tactless, quarrelsome and unyielding, tiring Tsar Alexander I with his frequent intercessions;63


– afraid of riding – “на него наводила страх верховая езда”64 (hence the ironic undertones in the description of Peter’s horse? hence the narrator’s squeamishness and fear of heights?); – a friend of Count Chvostov, who regularly attended his literary soirées (as did Anna Volkova)65 (hence the narrator’s enthusiasm for Chvos-tov?); – extremely concerned about the frequent robberies and burglaries in town66 (hence the narrator’s hysterical fear of burglars?). The resemblances are striking, but it is not a “perfect fit”. Šiškov was staunchly anti-Karamzinian (though he did recommend Karamzin for admis-sion to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1818) and would probably have had little sympathy for a Romantic figure like Evgenij. Though he remained childless, Šiškov was married twice and lived in a house that Aksakov con-sidered small.67 Also, there is no evidence that Šiškov was fastidious about clothing and personal appearance. For all the resemblances, Puškin’s narrator remains an independent fictional construct adapted to its given textual role. This construct incorporates elements of self-irony. The implication that the narrator is the sort of person who would be disturbed by the incursion of his housemaid into his study is strongly reminiscent of Puškin himself, who was notoriously fastidious about his books and papers and would not allow anyone to touch them. Also, the suggestion that the narrator is partial to grand balls and champagne-and-punch bachelor parties reminds us more of Puškin than it does of the staid and reserved Šiškov. These elements of self-irony tie in with the author’s attempt to seduce us into equating the narrator with Puškin himself. Of course, the question is bound to arise why Puškin should have chosen partially to model his narrator on Šiškov of all people. It seems unlikely that the figure of Šiškov would have loomed so large in his imagination as to inspire and motivate him in writing ‘Mednyj vsadnik’. However, there is a possible, if equally speculative, explanation. If we return to Lednicki’s insight that there are conspicuous parallels between ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ and the ‘Digression’ (‘Ustęp’) in Part III of Mickiewicz’s Dziady, we can see how Puškin might have been prompted to think of Šiškov when reading Mickiewicz. Given that Puškin’s knowledge of Polish may have been cursory and that no part of Dziady was translated into Russian until 1844 (when von Rotkirch translated Part IV), Puškin’s understanding of the text may have been more superficial than Lednicki assumes. What Puškin would have had little trouble noticing is that, in describing St. Petersburg, Mickiewicz repeatedly refers to snow, to wind and storm, to the bitter cold, to barren wastes and muddy ground, to granite (also in connection with iron), and that he spends almost half the “Digression” describing a military parade. He also reveals the strong religiosity that led him to take a Messianic view of Poland.

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NOTES 1 One such attempt is Andreas Ebbinghaus, ‘Die Bild gewordene Umgestaltung

Russlands’, Puškin und Russland: Zur künstlerischen Biographie des Dich-ters, Wiesbaden, 2004, pp. 418-432. Ebbinghaus begins by pointing out that the traditional dichotomy does not accord with what we know of Puškin and the rest of his work:

Die Hauptlinie des traditionellen Deutungsansatzes unterstellt dem Werk eine gewisse geschichtsphilosophische Abstraktheit, die im übrigen Oeuvre nicht begegnet und schlecht zu Puškin passt. Eine Antinomie von Staat und Individuum, von der die Deutungsversuche lange Zeit praktisch ausschliesslich ausgingen, hat Puškin nicht interessiert. (p. 418)

He then goes on to expound the view that the poem is primarily a poetic representation of Peter’s historic role for Russia. Seen this way, he claims, Evgenij’s bereavement and consequent madness are merely a way of achieving a heightened individual consciousness whose function is to bundle the multitude of perspectives (sculptural, iconographic, historical, docu-mentary, etc.) the poem is thought to unite. Ebbinghaus must be admired for challenging the traditional paradigm, but the abstruse, convoluted and highly implausible construction he offers fails to provide a meaningful alternative. Nevertheless his work on ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ affords a number of insights to which we shall have occasion to return.

The main elaboration of the traditional dichotomy has been the claim, originally made by Brjusov, that the poem contains allegorical references to the Decembrist uprising of 1825. See Valerij Brjusov, Moj Puškin, Moskva, Leningrad, 1929; Dmitrij Blagoj, ‘Mif Puškina o dekabristach: sociolo-gičeskaja interpretacija Mednogo Vsadnika’, Pečat’ i revoljucija, 4-5 (1925), pp. 5-23 and 15-33; and Jurij Borev, Iskusstvo interpretacii i ocenki: Opyt pročtenija ‘Mednogo vsadnika’, Moskva, 1981.

2 Charles Corbet, ‘Le symbolisme du Cavalier de bronze’, Revue des études slaves, 45 (1966), pp. 129-144 (p. 130).

3 Knigge has dubbed these three views: Staatskonzeption (“state view”), humanistische Konzeption (“humanist view”), and tragische Unaufgelöstheit (“tragic non-resolution”) respectively; see Armin Knigge, Puškin, Amster-dam, 1984.

For the state view, see Dmitrij Merežkovskij, ‘Puškin’, Večnye sputniki, Sankt-Peterburg, 1897; A.N. Pypin, Istorija russkoj literatury, 4 Vols, Sankt-Peterburg, 1903, Vol. 4; V. Sipovskij, Puškin: Žizn’ i tvorčestvo, Sankt-Peterburg, 1907; B. Ėngel’gardt, ‘Istorizm Puškina’, Puškinist. Istoriko-lite-raturnyj sbornik, 2 (1916), pp. 1-158; V. Gippius, ‘Problema Puškina’, Vre-mennik Puškinskoj komissii, 1 (1936), pp. 253-261; L.G. Grossman, Puškin,


Moskva, 1939: D. Blagoj, Masterstvo Puškina, Moskva, 1955, pp. 203-222; G. Gukovskij, Puškin i problemy realističeskogo stilja, Moskva, 1957; B. Tomaševskij, Puškin. Kniga vtoraja. Materialy k monografii (1824-1837), Moskva, Leningrad, 1961; A.V. Lunačarskij, ‘Aleksandr Sergeevič Puškin’, Sobranie sočinenij v vos’mi tomach, Vol. 1, Moskva, 1963, pp. 44-89.

For the humanist view, see J. Tretiak, Mickiewicz i Puszkin, Warszawa, 1906; V. Brjusov, Moj Puškin, Moskva, Leningrad, 1929, and ‘Mednyj vsadnik’, Sobranie sočinenij, Moskva, 1975, 7 Vols, Vol. 7, pp. 30-61; A. Makedonov, ‘Gumanizm Puškina’, Literaturnyj kritik, 1 (1937); G. Makogonenko, ‘Issledovanie o realizme Puškina’, Voprosy literatury, 2 (1958), pp. 231-241; M. Eremin, ‘V graždanstve severnoj deržavy…’, V mire Puškina. Sbornik statej, Moskva, 1974; I. Tojbin, Puškin. Tvorčestvo 1830-ch godov i voprosy istorizma, Voronež, 1976; N. Izmajlov, ‘“Mednyj vsadnik” A.S. Puškina. Istorija zamysla i sozdanija, publikacii i izučenija’, A. Puškin, ‘Mednyj vsad-nik’, Leningrad, 1978; A.M. Gurevič, Romantizm Puškina, Moskva, 1992, pp. 151-167.

For the tragic non-resolution view, see P.A. Mezencev, ‘Poėma Puškina “Mednyj vsadnik” (k voprosu ob idejnom soderžanii)’, Russkaja literatura, 2 (1958), pp. 57-68; P. Antokol’skij, O Puškine, Moskva, 1960; V. Lavreckaja, Proizvedenija A.S. Puškina na temy russkoj istorii, Moskva, 1962; E.A. Toddes, ‘K izučeniju Mednogo vsadnika’, Puškinskij sbornik. Učenye zapiski latvijskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 106 (1968), pp. 92-113; G. Schramm, ‘Puschkins politisches Dilemma’, R. von Thadden et al. (Eds), Das Vergangene und die Geschichte, Göttingen, 1973; A.D.P. Briggs, ‘The Hidden Qualities of Puškin’s “Mednyj vsadnik”’, Canadian American Slavic Studies, 10 (1976), pp. 228-240; P.V. Palievskij, ‘Puškin i vybor russkoj literaturnoj novoj mirovoj dorogi’, Literatura i teorija, Moskva, 1979, pp. 41-61; N.N. Skatov, ‘“Ėto russkij čelovek v ego razvitii…..”. K probleme ėvoljucii A.S. Puškina’, Voprosy literatury, 23 (1979), pp. 42-71; E. Majmin, ‘Polifonizm chudožestvennogo myšlenija v poėme “Mednyj vsadnik”’, Boldinskie čtenija 1979, Gor’kij, 1980; M.N. Ėpštejn, ‘Faust na beregu morja. Tipologičeskij analiz parallel’nych motivov u Puškina i Gete’, Voprosy literatury, 25 (1981), pp. 89-110; G.V. Makarovskaja, ‘Mednyj vsadnik’: itogi i problemy izučenija, Saratov, 1981.

4 On various forms of irony in Evgenij Onegin, see M.G. Sokoljanskij, ‘Ironija v romane Evgenij Onegin’, Izvestija Akademii Nauk. Serija Literatury i Jazyka, 58 (1999), No. 2, pp. 34-43. On Romantic irony in Evgenij Onegin see Monika Greenleaf, Puškin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony, Stanford CA, 1994, pp. 205-286. For lexical irony in Evgenij Onegin, see Melchior de Wolff, ‘Romanticism Unmasked: Lexical Irony in Aleksandr Puškin’s Evgenij Onegin’, Theo D’haen et al. (Eds), Convention and Innovation in Literature, Amsterdam, 1989. T.E. Little, ‘Puškin’s Tatyana and Onegin: a study in irony’, New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 9 (1975), pp. 19-28, fails to distinguish between Romantic and lexical irony but makes a strong case for the centrality of irony to the conception of Evgenij

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Onegin. On Romantic irony in the Povesti Belkina, see M. Shrayer, ‘Re-thinking romantic irony: Puškin, Byron, Schlegel and the Queen of Spades’, Slavic and East European Journal, 36 (1992), No. 4, pp. 397-414; O. Po-volockaja, ‘Metel’: Kollizija i smysl’, Zvezda, 73 (1996), No. 3, pp. 152-168; and Ė.S. Afanas’ev, ‘Povesti Belkina A.S. Puškina: Ironičeskaja proza’, Russkaja literatura: istoriko-literaturnyj žurnal, 43 (2000), No. 2, pp. 177-184.

5 Heinrich Heine, Romantische Schule, Book Two, p. 84. 6 M. Gordin, ‘Veličie ničtožnogo geroja’, Voprosy literatury (1984), No. 1, pp.

149-167 (p. 150). 7 Pierre Schoentjes, Poétique de l’ironie, Paris, 2001, p. 85. 8 Pierre Schoentjes, Poétique de l’ironie, p. 85. 9 Examples and commentary (Austen, Montesquieu) based on D.C. Muecke,

Irony and the Ironic, London and New York, 1970, pp. 17 and 57. 10 André Hallay, ‘L’ironie’, Revue politique et littéraire, 9 (1898), No. 17 (23

April); quoted in D.C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony, London and New York, 1969, pp. 68-69.

11 Philippe Hamon, L’ironie littéraire. Essais sur les formes de l’écriture oblique, Paris, 1996, p. 30.

12 Wayne Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, Chicago and London, 1974, pp. 3-8. Conventional narrative irony, to which Booth devotes three-quarters of his study, is a structural irony that like verbal irony, of which it is a literary extension, must fulfil four conditions:

a. it is intended (i.e. created by human beings to be understood “with some precision” by other human beings);

b. it is covert (i.e. the ironic meaning has to be reconstructed from a surface meaning);

c. it is stable (i.e. the reconstructed meaning is not further undermined in an indefinitely regressive process);

d. it is finite in application (i.e. the reconstructed meaning is in some sense “local” or “limited” and not based on an ironic vision of “things in general”).

Romantic irony and other modern ironies fulfil some but not all of these conditions. For a commendably clear account of the contrast between the Romantic and conventional irony, see Lilian Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony in European Narrative, London, 1984, pp. 225-239. According to Furst, tra-ditional irony allows “veiled incongruities and ambiguities” to be resolved into a determinate meaning, while Romantic irony makes the reader realize that “truth is unattainable and paradox prevails”; here the signals the implied author gives are “loud and manifold” but ultimately “conflicting and confusing”. In traditional irony there is a knowing complicity between the implied author and at least a part of his audience; in Romantic irony it is the reader who is the disconcerted and disoriented victim of the irony. Gone is the “sense of dissembling that is meant to be seen through”; instead “the mask merges with the persona in a displacement meant to generate disorientation”. As she says in her telling summing up: “While traditional irony is between the


lines, romantic irony is in the lines” (p. 231). Romantic irony should not be confused with irony of Romanticism. Romanticism can be ironized in several ways, of which Romantic irony is only one.

13 Robert Martin, Pour une logique du sens, Paris, 1983, pp. 269-274; in an attempt to reach the Anglo-Saxon world: Robert Martin, ‘Irony and the Universe of Belief’, Lingua, 87 (1992), pp. 77-90.

14 Wayne Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, p. 1. 15 It is doubts about the writer’s sanity that have prevented Robert Walser’s

Jakob von Gunten (1909) from being securely identified as ironic. In this story, the narrator praises the uninspiring private boarding school he attends (called Benjamenta, presumably from Benjamin + Lat. mens, mentis) for promoting ignorance, small-mindedness and blind obedience as a safeguard against vanity and disappointment. Walser went mad and was committed to a psychiatric clinic for the last twenty-five years of his life (1929-1954).

16 Richard Gregg’s defence of his interpretation of ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ in ‘The Nature of Nature and the Nature of Eugene in the Bronze Horseman’, Slavic and East European Journal, 21 (1977), No. 2 (Summer), pp. 167-179 (p. 175) provides a striking illustration of the mindset from which such charges issue. “The proposed reading,” he says (referring to his own interpretation), “does not presume to nullify its predecessors (the presumption would be consi-derable) or to foreclose future interpretative forays.” In this view, apparently, it is a virtue if an interpretation does not rule out any other, past or future, real or potential. The interpreter of classical irony, who must of necessity rule out all other interpretations, is doomed to the starkest condemnation.

17 For the sake of simplicity, I shall not consider MS variants. Analysis of these variants may eventually help us to see how Puškin gradually honed his irony to perfection, but this is a matter of detail best left until the core thesis has been satisfactorily established.

18 This seems to be what Ebbinghaus has in mind when he says: Der auktoriale Erzähler wird im Werk daher laufend relativiert. Das Mittel hierzu ist sein – durch die Onegin-Stilanspielungen, durch seine “Gewöhnung” an den Namen “Evgenij” usw. unterstützte – Fin-gierung als “Dichter A. S. Puškin”.

Unfortunately, he does not develop this important insight. See Andreas Ebbinghaus, ‘Die Bild gewordene Umgestaltung Russlands’, p. 432.

19 Michael Basker is on the right track when he says of the footnotes: “Taken at face value the information offered in the annotations is next to useless: it may seem inconsequential […] and fragmentary […], and there is a bewildering randomness in what is referenced […] and what is not. The notes resist rather than assist interpretation, and thereby challenge the ‘curious’ reader […] to search for their concealed meanings”, but he veers off the right track when he concludes that “the notes […] persistently undermine stable meaning and are subversive, singly and collectively of the author’s own positions.” In my

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view, the notes are part of a stable irony that subverts the position of the narrator. See Michael Basker, ‘Notes of Confusion: On the Footnotes to The Bronze Horseman’, in Robert Reid and Joe Andrew (Eds), Two Hundred Years of Puškin, 3 Vols, Amsterdam, New York, 2003-2004, Vol. 2, pp. 139-161.

20 Grigorij Gukovskij, Puškin i problemy realističeskogo stilja, Moskva, 1957, pp. 394-413.

21 B. Ėngel’gardt, ‘Istorizm Puškina’, Puškinist: Istoriko-literaturnyj sbornik, 2 (1916), pp. 1-158 (pp. 136, 137).

22 Ebbinghaus remarks on the paucity of the narrator’s commentary at critical junctures here and later: “Der Erzähler erweist sich als sparsamer Kommentator des Erzählten. Evgenijs Schlag auf die Stirn, die Angst auf dem Gesicht des Helden oder seine Flucht vor dem Reiter werden im Poem nur erzählt, nicht aber psychologisch oder handlungslogisch erläutert.” From this he infers, quite correctly, that the reader is left to draw his own conclusions on the basis of the information given: “So bleibt dem Leser zunächst nur eines: die Gedanken und Vorstellungen des Helden aus dessen mimischen und gestischen Zeichen, diesen averbalen Reaktionen auf das Erlebte, zu er-schliessen.” However, in the end he is again unable to capitalize on his insight and draws the wrong conclusion: “Die Weigerung des Erzählers dem Leser zu helfen, ist indes nicht ohne Sinn: sie zwingt den Leser, sich in die Wahrnehmung Evgenijs hineinzuversetzen” (see Andreas Ebbinghaus, ‘Die Bild gewordene Umgestaltung Russlands’, p. 424).

23 Andreas Ebbinghaus, ‘Puškins “Petersburg-Erzählung” “Mednyj vsadnik”: Ein Beitrag zur Interpretation’, Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie, 51 (1991), pp. 86-142.

24 See Natal’ja Popova, Krepostnaja aktrisa, Sankt-Peterburg, 2001; Anatolij Rogov, Praskov’ja Žemčugova, Moskva, 2004; Douglas Smith, The Pearl: a true tale of forbidden love in Catherine the Great’s Russia, New Haven CT, 2008; and Rachel Polonsky, Molotov’s Magic Lantern, London, 2010. According to Smith: “After her death, Praskovia passed into legend. The story of her improbable journey from serf to countess inspired a folk song sung by millions of peasants across Russia. Penny prints depicting a romanticized first meeting with Nicholas hung in many Russian homes. […] Praskovia’s tale was recalled in poems and novellas” (p. 3). For Polonsky she became a “heroine of sentimental folklore, a paragon of charity and innate gentility” (p. 28). Puškin was personally acquainted with Nikolaj Šeremetev, the couple’s son Dmitrij, and Praskov’ja’s friend Tat’jana Šlykova, who became Dmitrij’s second mother.

25 Gray has a yew-tree but Žukovskij replaces it by a willow-tree, perhaps assuming that the willow-tree would be far more familiar to Russian readers, both in reality and as a symbol. In any case, English yew and Russain iva are obvious cognates (both deriving from Proto-Indo-European *h1eiH-u̯eh2). In Russia, the yew (Russ. tis) is found largely only in the country’s eastern and south-western margins.


26 Homer’s Odyssey, book 10, lines 503-512 (line 510). At the time of writing,

Homer’s Odyssey had just been published in a new four-volume Russian translation by Ivan Martynov (Sankt-Peterburg, 1826-1828), which largely superseded Petr Ekimov’s earlier two-volume version (Moskva, 1788).

27 That falling asleep is a not a momentary occurrence but a gradual process was known already to the Ancients. Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius (385/390- after 430), in his commentary to Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, speaks of fantastic visions presenting themselves between waking and complete repose (“inter vigiliam et adultam quietem”). The notion was revisited and developed by eighteenth-century physiologists like Charles Bonnet in his Contemplation sur la nature (1762) and Albrecht von Haller in his essay ‘Über das Träumen’ (1797). The motif of so-called “Halbschlafbilder” was common in early nineteenth-century German literature, as shown in Helmut Pfotenhauer and Sabine Schneider, Nicht völlig Wachen und nicht ganz ein Traum: die Halbschlafbilder in der Literatur, Würzburg, 2006. In the second part of Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften (1809), Ottilie takes to her bed and half-asleep (“im süssen Gefühl zwischen Schlaf und Wachen”) suddenly sees her estranged husband Eduard moving nimbly around a brightly-lit room dressed in a suit of armour. In the best-known falling-asleep scene in German Romanticism, Novalis has the eponymous hero of Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) succumb to sleep gradually (“Der Jüngling verlohr sich allmählich in süssen Fantasien und entschlummerte”) after having fantasized about talking animals, trees and stones. That falling asleep involves a gradual transition from waking to sleep was well understood by Ludwig Tieck, E.T.A. Hoff-mann and Jean Paul. According to Pfotenhauer, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s poetics is centrally dependent on what he calls “Halbschlafbilder”, images surfacing in a “Dämmerzustand an der Schwelle des Traums”, in a “Zustand der Bewusst-seinstrübung beim Entschlummern”, see Helmut Pfotenhauer, ‘Geschichte an den Rändern des Traums: E.T.A. Hoffmanns Halbschlafbilder’, in Peter-André Alt and Christiane Leiteritz (Eds), Traum-Diskurse der Romantik, Berlin, New York, 2005, p. 198. Hoffmann himself speaks of the “Zustand des Delirierens, der dem Einschlafen vorhergeht” (‘Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier’, Werke in sechs Bänden, Frankfurt, 1993, Vol. 2/1, p. 63, quoted in Pfotenhauer, p. 197), and the “Delirium, das kein Schlaf, sondern ein Kampf zwischen Schlafen und Wachen ist” (‘Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr’, Sämtliche Werke, Frankfurt, 1993, Vol. 5, p. 288; quoted in Pfotenhauer, p. 207). Pfotenhauer also sees “Halbschlafbilder” as forming the principal theme in the work of Jean Paul, see Helmut Pfotenhauer, ‘Unbändige Sinneswelt. Halbschlafbilder bei Jean Paul’, in Roger Paulin and Helmut Pfotenhauer (Eds), Die Halbschlafbilder in der Literatur, den Künsten und den Wissen-schaften, Würzburg, 2011, pp. 43-52. Puškin may have had knowledge of Novalis from Ševyrev, who was a great admirer of Novalis and frequently gave oral translations from German at literary soirées. The works of E.T.A. Hoffmann were known in Russia from the 1820s onwards. According to Štejn, Puškin would have been acquainted with Hoffmann’s work by reading

102 Peter Butler

the French translations of Hoffmann in his personal library (Jean Cohen’s 1829 translation of Die Elixiere des Teufels and Loève-Veimar’s edition of Hoffmann’s complete works, completed in 1833) and through conversations with Perovskij-Pogorel’skij, Odoevskij and Lenc (Sergej Štejn, Puškin i Gofman, Tartu, 1929). Jean Paul’s works were translated into Russian from the late 1830s onwards but his works were known in Russian literary circles years earlier, partly on the basis of translations into French. That Puškin was aware that the act of falling asleep was a gradual process of transition with a slow dissociation of thought from reality comes through in the introduction to Ruslan’s dream in ‘Ruslan i Ljudmila’ (song 5, lines 448-451):

Глубоку думу думал он, Мечты летели за мечтами, И неприметно веял сон Над ним холодными крылами.

and by Grinev’s portrayal of his nightmare in ‘Kapitanskaja dočka’ (chapter 2): “Я находился в том состоянии чувств и души, когда существенность, уступая мечтаниям, сливается с ними в неясных видениях первосония.” As Michail Geršenzon comments in ‘Sny Puškina’, Stat’i o Puškine, Moskva, 1926, pp. 96-110 (p. 100): “Пушкин различает в сновидении два этапа: сначала воcприятия только уступают игре воображения, затем тонут в ней.”

28 That external sensory stimuli can be incorporated into dreams has been known for millennia. Aristotle in his treatise On Dreams (Peri enypniōn, better known under its Latin title De insomniis), one of three treatises on sleep and dreaming that form part of what Giles of Rome later called the Parva naturalia, recognizes that the sound of a cock crowing or dog barking outside (“kai alektryonōn kai kynōn phōnēn”) or the light of a lamp (“phōs tou lychnou”) in the bedroom may be incorporated into a dream (On Dreams, chapter 3, § 14). Puškin’s awareness of this phenomenon is demonstrated by Grinev’s nightmare in ‘Kapitanskaja dočka’, where the sound of the storm and the rolling movement to which the hero falls asleep carry over into his dream (“Я […] задремал, убаюканный пением бури и качкой тихой езды. […] Мне казалось, буран еще свирепствовал, и мы еще блуждали по снежной пустыне”).

29 Lev Pumpjanskij, ‘Mednyj vsadnik i poėtičeskaja tradicija XVIII veka’, Vre-mennik Puškinskoj komissii, 4-5 (1939), pp. 91-124; reprinted in Lev Pum-pjanskij, Klassičeskaja tradicija, Moskva, 2000.

30 Andrew Kahn, Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, Bristol, 1998, p. 58. 31 Andrew Kahn, Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, p. 64. 32 That dreamers are sometimes aware of sleep paralysis has been known since

ancient times. In Western civilization nightmares have long been associated with a sense of being set upon and pinned down by an evil spirit. This gave rise to the Ancient Greek term ephialtēs (“throwing on”), current from


Hippocrates onwards, and its late Latin equivalent incubus (“lying down on”). It is still evident in German Albdruck (“pressure exerted by an elf”), French cauchemar (caucher < Lat. calpestare “tread underfoot” + mar > O.N. mara, “hag”), Icelandic martröð (mar + tröð “trampled on by a hag”), etc. A direct connection with witchcraft is made in German Hexendrücken (Hexe “witch” + drücken “press”) and Southern states colloquial English to be ridden by a witch. There is evidence that accusations of witchcraft in the Salem and Augsburg witch trials were based on accounts of sleep paralysis in night-mares. Many languages have folklore terms for sleep paralysis that are distinct from the word for nightmare, e.g. Japanese kanashibari (kane “metal” + shibaru “tie up”), Chinese gŭi yā shēn (“evil spirit presses on body”), testify-ing to the antiquity of its perception as a distinct phenomenon. On all these points see Owen Davies, ‘The Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis, and Witchcraft Accusations’, Folklore, 114 (2003), pp. 181-203. That Puškin was aware of the phenomenon is borne out by Tat’jana’s reaction to the assortment of monsters she meets in her dream in Evgenij Onegin, chapter 5, verse 19 (“и торопливо / Татьяна силится бежать / Нельзя никак; нетерпеливо / Ме-таясь, хочет закричать: / не может”) and by Grinev’s reaction to the black-bearded axe-wielding maniac wreaking carnage before his eyes in his dream in ‘Kapitanskaja dočka’ (“Я хотел бежать… и не мог”).

33 Andrew Kahn, Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, p. 70. 34 The Aeneid had not been translated into Russian at the time of writing and the

textual correspondences are minimal. For Kahn everything seems to rest on the meaning of the phrase “gurges aestuat” (VI, 296-297), which, while it may evoke a sense of boiling, is largely incidental to Vergil’s image, which stresses the murky foulness of the water and the filthy appearance of the ferryman.

35 For the translation see A.S. Norov, ‘Otryvok iz 3-i pesni poėmy Ad’, Syn otečestva, 1823, No. 30. The role of Dante’s Divine Comedy in ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ is considered in I. Belza, ‘Dantovskie otzvuki v Mednom vsadnike’, Dantovskie čtenija, Moskva, 1982, pp. 170-182. Belza fails to spot the crucial parallel and shows no awareness of the translation issue.

36 Andrew Kahn, Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, p. 70. 37 See G.P. Makogonenko, Tvorčestvo A.S. Puškina v 1830-e gody (1830-1833),

Leningrad, 1974, p. 318; N.V. Izmajlov, ‘Mednyj vsadnik A.S. Puškina. Istorija zamysla i sozdanija, publikacii i izučenija’, in A.S. Puškin: ‘Mednyj vsadnik’, Leningrad, 1978, p. 263; G.V. Makarovskaja, ‘Mednyj vsadnik’: Itogi i problemy izučenija, Saratov, 1978, p. 9. A notable exception is Valerij Brjusov, who concludes that if the words are missing they cannot be crucially important. See Valerij Brjusov, ‘Mednyj vsadnik’, Sobranie sočinenij, 7 Vols, Moskva, 1975, Vol. 7, pp. 30-61 (p. 47).

38 See V.G. Belinskij, ‘Sočinenija Aleksandra Puškina. Stat’ja odinnadcataja i poslednjaja’, Polnoe sobranie sočinenij, 13 Vols, Vol. 7, Moskva, 1955, pp. 535-579 (pp. 542-548).

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39 In interpreting this passage, it will be helpful to set aside for a moment some

of the issues that have preoccupied Puškin scholarship about the prologue. This not to deny the complex genetic links to the eighteenth-century ode Lev Pumpjanskij argued for in his ‘“Mednyj vsadnik” i poėtičeskaja tradicija XVIII veka’ or the parallels to the excursus in the third part of Mickiewicz’s Dziady first pointed out by Józef Tretiak in Mickiewicz i Puszkin, Warszawa, 1906. However, focussing on such detail too early in the interpretative process is more likely to obscure the irony than to reveal it. Many of the odes Pumpjanskij considers are the work of obscure poets, and Dziady had not been translated into Russian at the time of writing. The reader of irony is rarely expected to have highly specialized knowledge of this kind.

40 That “громадность” and “стройность” are basic features (“основные черты”) of the narrator’s St. Petersburg was remarked on by A. Slonimskij in his Masterstvo Puškina, Moskva, 1959, pp. 296, 297. However, Slonimskij does not quite know what to do with this insight. He suggests that the emphatic depiction of “громадность” and “стройность” acts as a counterfoil to the destruction wrought by the flood, highlighting intact architecture to heighten the tragedy of human suffering, but he does not explain why in this case architectonic stability should be hinted at in advance rather than revealed in retrospect.

41 D.N. Medriš, ‘“O čem že dumal On?..”: Fol’klornoe slovo v Mednom vsad-nike’, Russkaja reč’, 1 (1992), pp. 99-103; K. Viktorova, ‘Peterburgskaja po-vest’’, Russian Literature, 28 (1990), pp. 419-440 (p. 421).

42 Nikolaj Pospelov notices the semantic correspondence between the two elements but fails to draw any conclusions from it. See Nikolaj Semenovič Pospelov, Sintaksičeskij stroj stichotvornych proizvedenij Puškina, Moskva, 1960, p. 186.

43 Puškin uses the phrase “пустынных вод” in ‘Poltava’ (Part 1, line 22) and the even closer phrase “на берега пустынных волн” in the poem ‘Poėt’. However, even if the meaning in these contexts is not ironic, this does not argue against an ironic meaning here. Ironic meaning is tied to a given context, and irony is in any case often tinged with self-irony.

44 In the Russian Orthodox Bible, кумир is used in the second commandment (Exodus 20:4): “Не делай себе кумира и никакого изображения того, что на небе вверху […]”. It also occurs in Leviticus 26:1; Deuteronomy 4:16,23; 7:25; 27:15; 29:17; Judges 17:3, 4; 18:14,17,18; 2 Chronicles 19:3; 34:3,4,7; Isaiah 10:10; 17:8; Hosea 10:1; Habakkuk 2:18; Micah 5:13; Nahum 1:14. Истукан occurs in Deuteronomy 7:5; 9:12; Judges 17:3,4; 18:17,18, 20,30,31; 2 Samuel 5:21; 1 Kings 15:13; 2 Kings 21:7; 2 Chronicles 15:16; 23:17; 33:12,19; Psalms 78:58; 97:7; 106:19,36; Isaiah 41:29; 42:8,17; 46:1; 48:5; Jeremiah 10:14; 50:2,38; Ezekiel 7:20; Daniel 2:31,32,34,35; 3:1,2,3,5,7,10,12,14,15,18; 11:8; Hosea 2:8; 11:2; 13:2; Micah 1:7; Nahum 1:14; Habakkuk 2:18.

45 For example in L. Eremina, ‘Počemu vsadnik – mednyj?’, Nauka i žizn’, 75 (1978), No. 2; E.S. Chaev, ‘Ėpitet mednyj v poėme Mednyj vsadnik’, Vre-


mennik Puškinskoj komissii, 15 (1981), pp. 180-184; and N.I. Michajlova, ‘Poėma A.S. Puškina Mednyj vsadnik’, Boldinskie čtenija, Novgorod, 1991, pp. 90-103. Michajlova correctly identifies the biblical origin of “кумир” and points to the connection of “медный” with Numbers (but oddly not with 2 Kings). However, she fails to understand the potential significance of these elements in the text.

46 In the wording of the Russian Bible: “Kaк одиноко сидит город, некогда многолюдный! он стал, как вдова; великий между народами, князь над областями сделaлся данником.”

47 There is a splendid (but, of course, extra-textual) irony in the fact that Nicholas I as censor took exception to the flattering “кумир” and replaced it with “гигант”.

48 Michail Eremin, ‘V graždanstve severnoj deržavy: iz nabljudenij nad tekstom Mednogo vsadnika’, V mire Puškina: sbornik statej, Moskva, 1974, p. 162.

49 If anything dams up the Neva, causing waters to recede, it is barriers of ice. These are estimated to have played a significant role in a quarter of Sankt-Peterburg’s more than three hundred floods (see Kim Pomeranec, Tri veka peterburgskich navodnenij, Sankt-Peterburg, 2005, p. 125). Whether ice was at issue in the great flood of 1824 is unclear, so it is difficult to know what Puškin would have believed and expected his readers to believe on this point. Neither Berch (Podrobnoe istoričeskoe izvestie o vsech navodnenijach, byvšich v Sankt-Peterburge, Sankt-Peterburg, 1826) nor Aller (Opisanie navodnenija byvšago v Sankt-Peterburge 7 čisla nojabrja 1824 goda, Sankt-Peterburg, 1826) can help us here. Low atmospheric pressure and high winds were certainly important but the hydrometeorology is vastly more complex than the narrator’s account suggests. What we know is that cyclones moving north-east over the Baltic Sea suck up water, releasing it into the Bay of Finland in long waves that cause the water levels to rise as the sea becomes ever more shallow. Though Puškin would not have known the scientific details, he would have known that the water levels rose because of unusually large waves coming in from the Bay of Finland.

50 Anyone who has understood the irony here will not be surprised to learn that neither Berch’s nor Aller’s detailed account of the flood makes reference to cemeteries being churned up or coffins floating through the city. Kahn relegates this detail to the realms of contemporary legend. Thanks to Rja-binina, we know that coffins were mentioned in a poem published by a certain Anna Volkova in 1824:

И гробы, вырыты волной разъяренной, Несутся бурею по пенистым водам, Жилища мирного в могиле труп лишенный, Терзаем вихрями, влачится по валам.

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See Andrew Kahn, Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, pp. 59, 60; and N.A. Rjabi-

nina, ‘K probleme literaturnych istočnikov poėmy A.S. Puškina Mednyj vsadnik’, Boldinskie čtenija, Gor’kij, 1977, pp. 80-91.

51 Roman Jakobson, ‘Zametki na poljach Evgenija Onegina’, Raboty po poėtike, Moskva, 1987, p. 220.

52 The dream played a prominent role in the European Romanticism of the time: English (Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron), German (E.T.A. Hoffmann, Tieck, Brentano, Novalis, Mörike, Jean Paul, Kleist) and Polish (Mickiewicz). Its role has been studied in John Smeed, Jean Paul’s Dreams, London, 1966; Douglas B. Wilson, The Romantic Dream: Words-worth and the Poetics of the Unconscious, Lincoln NE and London, 1993; Sheila Dickson and Mark Ward (Eds.), Romantic Dreams, Glasgow, 1998; Jennifer Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming, Cambridge, 1998; Philipp Lersch, Der Traum in der deutschen Romantik, München, 1923; Paula Ritzler, Der Traum in der Dichtung der deutschen Romantik, Bern, 1943; Walter Hinderer, ‘Traumdiskurse und Traumtexte im Umfeld der deutschen Romantik’, in Gabriele Brandstetter und Gerhard Neumann (Hg.), Romantische Wissens-poetik, Würzburg, 2004; Peter-André Alt und Christiane Leiteritz (Hg.), Traum-Diskurse der Romantik, Berlin, New York, 2005; Helmut Pfotenhauer und Sabine Schneider, Nicht völlig Wachen und nicht ganz ein Traum: die Halbschlafbilder in der Literatur, Würzburg, 2006: Albert Béguin: L’âme romantique et le rêve, Paris, 2006; Maria Piasecka, Mistrzowie snu: Mickiewicz, Słowacki, Krasiński, Wrocław, 1992. For a partial study of the role of the dream in Puškin, see Michail Geršenzon, ‘Sny Puškina’, in Stat’i o Puškine, Moskva, 1926, pp. 96-110.

53 I am thinking particularly of the translations of Donald Michael Thomas (English, 1983), Rolf-Dietrich Keil (German, 1999), Eduardo Alonso Luengo (Spanish, 2001), Gianfranco Lauretano and Valentina Eberle (Italian, 2003), Léonid and Nata Minor (French, 2003), Shinya Kōri (Japanese, 2005).

54 See Sergej Timofeevič Aksakov, ‘Vospominanija’, Sobranie sočinenij, 6 Vols, Vol. 3, Sankt-Peterburg, 1909-1910, pp. 333-395; Vladimir Igorevič Karpec, Muž otečestvoljubivyj, Moskva, 1987; Vladimir Jakovlevič Stojunin, Aleksandr Semenovič Šiškov, Sankt-Peterburg, 1880; Aleksandr Semenovič Šiškov, Rassuždenie o starom i novom sloge rossijskogo jazyka, Sankt-Peterburg, 1803, and Pribavlenie k sočineniju, nazyvaemomu Rassuždenie o starom i novom sloge rossijskogo jazyka, Sankt-Peterburg, 1804.

55 Aksakov, p. 364; Karpec, p. 32. 56 Stojunin, pp. 3-4. 57 Karpec, p. 15. 58 Aksakov, pp. 350, 373; Stojunin, p. 2. 59 Karpec, p. 32. 60 Aksakov, pp. 343-347. 61 Aksakov, pp. 338, 339; Šiškov, Rassuždenie and Pribavlenie. 62 Aksakov, p. 334. 63 Karpec, p. 23; Stojunin, pp. 65, 113, 314.


64 Stojunin, p. 48. 65 Aksakov, pp. 380-382. 66 Stojunin, p. 331. 67 Aksakov, p. 341.

Puškinʼs ‘Mednyj vsadnik’ Revisited: A Reading in Conventional Narrative Irony

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